Ammonium and potassium removal from undiluted and diluted hydrolyzed urine using natural zeolites
Section snippets
Credit author statement
Urusha Regmi, Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Visualization. Treavor H. Boyer, Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition.
Materials
Zeolites. The two zeolites used in this work were natural clinoptilolite (NV–Na Ash Meadows, hydrous sodium aluminosilicate, granules) and natural chabazite (AZLB-Na Bowie, anhydrous sodium aluminosilicate, granules). Zeolite properties are listed in Table S1 in Supplementary data. The zeolites were obtained from St. Cloud Mining, USA. The zeolites were used as received and were measured and dosed on a dry mass basis for all experiments.
Real hydrolyzed urine. Collection of human urine was
Clinoptilolite adsorption
Ammonium removal. Fig. 1 shows the normalized TN concentration as a function of the normalized zeolite dose for urine solutions of 0.1%, 1%, 10%, and 100%. Because the initial TN concentration varied with the strength of the urine solution (see Table 2), all TN concentrations were normalized by their corresponding initial concentration. Similarly, zeolite dose was normalized by the urine solution level so that TN results could be compared on an equivalent basis. For conciseness, normalized TN
Conclusions
Removal of ammonium and potassium in real hydrolyzed urine using the natural zeolites clinoptilolite and chabazite was much higher in undiluted urine than diluted urine typical of domestic greywater or wastewater. This is a key finding as it illustrates the benefit of nutrient recovery via urine source separation rather than treatment of dilute waste streams such as wastewater effluent. The results of this research are also relevant to water-efficient wastewater plumbing in buildings. Removal
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This publication is supported by the National Science Foundation, NSF CAREER grant CBET- 1713704 and ASU Fulton Schools of Engineering start-up funding.
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