MAIN-STREAM DEAMMONIFICATION EVALUATION AT BLUE PLAINS ADVANCED WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANT (AWTP)

摘要

Wastewater treatment plants in the Chesapeake Bay Region, USA are challenged to meet veryrnlow nitrogen and phosphorus discharge limits due to eutrophication issues. While many arernsuccessful in achieving their goals, the increase in cost to reach them is driving manyrnmunicipalities to search for real alternative technologies to optimize the treatment efficiency andrnlower the cost per lb of N and P removed. This research was inspired by the success of a novelrnbiological technology namely “deammonification”, which is used widely in Europe for treatingrnnitrogen-rich recycle streams very efficiently using the anammox bacteria (Ref 5).rnDeammonification is a two step process where ammonia oxidizing bacteria (AOB) aerobicallyrnoxidize approximately half of the ammonia to nitrite and the anammox organisms an-aerobicallyrnoxidize the remaining half of ammonia via nitrite produced in the first step to nitrogen gasrnwithout the need for organic carbon (Ref 2). The objective of the research was to tryrnimplementing the same concept to treat municipal wastewater in the main treatment stream at arngiven plant and thus maximize the potential benefits in cost savings. The research was aiming tornidentify appropriate operational strategies and design parameters to achieve deammonificationrnfor treating diluted municipal wastewaters. The study thus far revealed some key factors forrnsuccessful process implementation and identified some future research focus areas.