Abstract
The inoculum biomass was collected from a pilot-scale (3 m3 process tank) nitritation-anaerobic ammonium oxidation (ANAMMOX) (deammonification moving bed biofilm (DeaMBBR)) reactor demonstrating the highest total nitrogen removal rate (TNRR) of 0.33 kg N m−3 day−1. This biomass was used for inoculating the anodic chamber of a microbial fuel cell (MFC) to investigate the capacity of DeaMBBR biomass to act as an exo-electrogenic consortia. Performance of MFCs inoculated with ANAMMOX-specific consortia collected from DeaMBBR (MFC-ANA) and another MFC-CON inoculated with a septic tank mixed anaerobic consortium as a control was investigated for electrochemical performance and wastewater treatment efficiency. These MFCs were operated for the total duration of 419 days during which regular feed was given and performance was monitored for first 30 cycles and last 30 cycles, with each cycle of 3 day duration. The MFC-ANA continuously generated bio-energy with higher volumetric power density (9.5 W m−3 and 6.0 W m−3) in comparison to MFC-CON (4.9 and 2.9 W m−3) during the first 30 and last 30 cycles of operational period, respectively. MFC-ANA also achieved 84 ± 2% and 80 ± 2% of COD removal efficiency and 89 ± 4% and 73 ± 2% of total nitrogen removal efficiency during first 30 and last 30 cycles of operational period, respectively. The improvement of nitrogen removal and power production in case of MFC-ANA over MFC-CON could be attributed to the ANAMMOX-denitrifiers populations and Trichococcus (14.92%) as denitrifying exo-electrogenic microbes (4.46%), respectively.
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Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the EU-India research co-funding mechanism INNO-INDIGO, by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India (BT/IN/INNO-INDIGO/28/MMG/2015-16) for IIT Kharagpur, India. This research was financially supported by IUT20-16, BT/IN/INNO-INDIGO/28/MMG/2015-16) and Saraswati 2.0 for University of Tartu, Estonia.
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Supplementary file1 (PDF 9 kb)—Figure S1. Autotrophic and heterotrophic N-removing culture variation in initial inoculum and DeaMBBRbiofilm samples.
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Supplementary file2 (PDF 28 kb)—Figure S2. Distribution of total strains in initial inoculum, DeaMBBR biomass, and anodic biofilm of MFCANA.
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Zekker, I., Bhowmick, G.D., Priks, H. et al. ANAMMOX-denitrification biomass in microbial fuel cell to enhance the electricity generation and nitrogen removal efficiency. Biodegradation 31, 249–264 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10532-020-09907-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10532-020-09907-w