Parameters of nitrogen removal by anammox process in UASB reactors

Abstract

Consulta en la Biblioteca ETSI Industriales (4783)

[EN] The water is the most important Earth resource. Nitrogen is necessary in the water because all living beings need it to build many essential components such as proteins, DNA, RNA, vitamins, hormones and enzymes. But it is also important for the environment to maintain the equilibrium of nitrogen cycle. Human activities have imbalanced it. By all this, many researches on nitrogen removal from the wastewater are carried out nowadays; most of them are biological processes. A very recent method is the ANAMMOX (ANAerobic AMMonium OXidation) process. It has been studied in many different reactor configurations. In this project three UASB reactors are used. They are inoculated with 50% of anaerobic granular sludge and 50% of flocular sludge from different sources (all containing Anammox organisms). The reactors are fed with semi synthetic wastewater with the following concentrations: 0.7 g N ¿ NH4+/L, 0.5 g N ¿ NO2-/L and 0.3 g N ¿ NO3-/L. The removal of nitrogen compounds is measured by photometry and the highest specific removal of total nitrogen is 0.44 kg-N/m3¿day.