Advancements in the application of aerobic granular biomass technology for sustainable treatment of wastewater

Abstract

Aerobic granular sludge technology can be regarded as the future standard for industrial and municipal wastewater treatment. As a consequence, a growing number of institutes and universities focus their scientific research on this new technology. Recently, after extensive Dutch research and development effort, an aerobic granular biomass technology has become available to the market. Full scale installations for both industrial and municipal applications are already on stream, under construction or in design. The technology is distinguished by the name ‘Nereda®’ and based on the specific characteristics of aerobic granular sludge. It can be considered as the first mature aerobic granular sludge technology applied at full scale. It improves on traditional activated sludge systems by a significantly lower use of energy and chemicals, its compactness and its favorable capital and operational costs.

Effect of particulate organic substrate on aerobic granulation and operating conditions of sequencing batch reactors

“…This resulted in a larger accumulation of flocs and therefore in a higher biomass concentration. The operation of AGS reactors at constant volume was previously reported (De Kreuk and van Loosdrecht, 2004;Giesen et al, 2013). Under such an operation mode, a low wastewater upflow velocity results in a plug-flow regime behavior of the liquid across the settled bed (Weissbrodt et al, 2014).…”

Chiral Analysis of Pesticides and Drugs of Environmental Concern: Biodegradation and Enantiomeric Fraction

“…Considering existing reports on biodegradation experiments using batch reactors, the main strengths highlighted are the robustness of reactors' functionality, the ability to survive pollutant shock loads, and high biomass density (compared to batch incubations with bacterial consortia or activated sludge inoculum) [80,93]. Conversion of lab-scale operating reactors to full-scale reactors applied to real scenarios has been accomplished, and Portugal, the Netherlands, South Africa, and China have full-scale batch reactors currently in operation [98]. Advances in this type of technology will benefit the diffusion of its application in the future [99].…”

Analysis of bacterial, fungal and archaeal populations from a municipal wastewater treatment plant developing an innovative aerobic granular sludge process

“…However, microbial populations of matured AGS have not been analyzed (Lee et al 2010), possible due to a lack of modern analytical approaches. Initial studies of AGS have been conducted in laboratory-scale reactors (de Kreuk 2006;Ni et al 2009;Liu et al 2011;Rocktaschel et al 2015) and very little information is known about AGS collected from full-scale operational WWTP (Giesen et al 2013;Li et al 2014).…”