A Novel Biofilm Carrier-Artificial Aquatic Mats vs a Common Biofilm Carrier of Carbon Fiber: Effect on Water Quality and Phosphorus Releasing

Abstract

Microbial biofilm plays a major role in aquatic ecosystems by acting as an important food source for fish and other aquatic creatures as well as a refuge for microorganisms. With this in mind, promoting bacterial biofilm formation on a matrix or a carrier is an important low cost strategy in keeping water ecosystem balance. In industrial wastewater processes, many biofilm carriers are built according to the microbial biofilm principle with the homophylic carrier used to treat the contaminative nature water bodies being absent. So we developed a novel biofilm carrier made from high polymer for in situ biofilm technology to improve natural water bodies and named the new carrier device as Artificial Aquatic Mats (AAMs). An investigation to research such device was performed in order to determine the influence of this novel photoautotrophic biofilms carrier on the changes of water quality and phosphorus (P) forms in sediments and to compare the effects of AAMs and carbon fiber carriers (CFC) treatment. Transparency of water appears to possibly be enhanced by the treatments of AAMs and CFC by inhibiting the harmful algae growth for allelopathy. Experimental results revealed, in a same projective area, the transparency cleaned by AAMs increased faster than that of CFC. Both devices had a certain positive effect on decreasing total phosphorus (TP) of water. In the control, there was a persistent large variationnot only the occurrence of algae blooms but also in the changes of both total P (TP) and P form concentrations in the sediments. TP concentrations in sediments of AAMs treatment remained higher than the CFC treatments throughout the experiment. With the exception of the Labile-P, the change in trend lines of all of the P forms in the two treatments did not deviate from one another. Organic matter (OM) was the most important P sink because the contributions of OM were well correlated with the TP and Labile-P. Statistical analysis in Ca-P and Residual-P showed that the AAMs-treatment could more prevent phosphorus from releasing from sediment into water column than that of CFC-treatment.

Study on Pollutant Removal Efficiencies of Artificial Aquatic Plants in the Black-odor River

“…Jin et al [10] conducted wastewater purification experiment with biological ribbon technology and achieved effective removal of pollutants. Wang et al [11] compared the effects of Artificial Aquatic Mats and carbon fiber carriers treatment on the changes of water quality and revealed that the transparency cleaned by the former increased faster than the latter. The polycyclic series artificial plants were set up in the lake of Hanyang City to improve water quality and it revealed that COD and Chl-a decreased obviously after treatment [12].…”