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Enrichment and characterization of a bilge microbial consortium with oil in water-emulsions breaking ability for oily wastewater treatment

“…and observed that increasing the cellular concentration from 2 to 4 mg/mL, the half-life of an O/W emulsion was significantly reduced. A positive correlation between the percent demulsification and the concentration of cells was also observed by Park et al (2000) and Nadarajah et al (2002). Considering an average bacterial cell weight of 1 9 10 -12 g (Malke et al 1982), we have used 0.1 mg cell/mL, a lower cell concentration compared to other studies; however due to the different characteristics of emulsions, quantitative comparisons should not be made.…”

“…Research on biological demulsification has primarily focused in water-in-oil emulsions (drops of water dispersed in oil), which are commonly present in oily waste sludge (Zolfaghari et al 2016;Cai et al 2019). However, study of the biological oil-in-water demulsification is still at a preliminary stage and few O/W emulsion breaking bacteria strains (mostly of terrestrial origin) have been reported (Park et al 2000;Das 2001;Li et al 2012;Coutinho et al 2013;Cai et al 2019). Different demulsifying microorganisms have been isolated from HC contaminated sites (Das 2001;Huang et al 2010;Mohebali et al 2012;Salehizadeh et al 2013) and the demulsifying capacity of a mixed bacterial culture has been characterized (Nadarajah et al 2002).…”