Abstract
Ammonia inhibition is considered a key issue when using liquid digestate for microalgae cultivation. To study the effect of pretreatment with a biological aerated filter (BAF) on microalgae culture with dairy liquid digestate, nitrification characteristics of BAFs under different hydraulic retention time (HRT) and the growth characteristics of Chlorella pyrenoidosa in effluents of BAFs were investigated. Results showed that the BAFs can rapidly nitrify ammonia nitrogen and significantly improve the light transmittance of liquid digestate (the maximum promotion rate was ~260%), and the effect improved as the HRT increased. Pretreatment of liquid digestate with BAFs can eliminate ammonia inhibition for C. pyrenoidosa. Furthermore, lipid, crude protein, and higher heating value (HHV) output were also not affected by HRT. The similar removal of nitrate nitrogen in microalgae culture systems using effluents with 6-h and 12-h HRT (21.59% and 21.07%, respectively) were recorded. The results suggested that BAF coupled with microalgae culture is a novel option on the resource utilization of dairy liquid digestate.
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The authors are grateful to Mohammad Asraful Alam for his kind help in English editing.
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This work was supported by the Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangzhou (202102080406), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21606230 and 21878291), Opening Foundation of Henan Key Laboratory of Industrial Microbial Resources and Fermentation Technology (HIMFT20190203), and the Natural Science Foundation for Research Team of Guangdong Province (2016A030312007).
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Lei Qin and Bo Wang carried out the experiments and wrote the manuscript. Pinzhong Feng and Yinghan Cao analyzed the data. Zhongming Wang and Shunni Zhu supervised the experimental work and revised the manuscript.
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Qin, L., Wang, B., Feng, P. et al. Treatment and resource utilization of dairy liquid digestate by nitrification of biological aerated filter coupled with assimilation of Chlorella pyrenoidosa. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 3406–3416 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-15903-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-15903-1