Application of volatile fatty acids from waste as an external carbon source for the denitrification process

Abstract: The gap between resource demand for the industrialized world and non-renewable feedstock like fossil fuels, essential agricultural fertilizer is getting increasingly severe, which has resulted in alarming-increasingly impacts on worldwide environmental problems. Meanwhile, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), as an essential facility for urbanization, is also confronting new rising challenges such as energy consumption and operation costs rather than only improving effluent wastewater quality. It is thereby important to develop new approaches for next-generation WWTPs with less energy consumption and costs in a sustainable way. The objective was to study the application of volatile fatty acids (VFAs) from waste as an external carbon source on denitrification by manometric tracking method in the lab-scale. Food waste and primary sludge were used for anaerobic fermentation to produce VFAs, which was then used as a sole external carbon source with various C/N ratio in denitrification batch test. The results were compared with traditional external carbon sources, acetate and methanol. It was found that the maximum denitrification rate with VFAs as an external carbon source was 15.73 ± 0.95 mg NOx-N/g VSS h, faster than those with acetate and methanol as external carbon sources. When C/N ratio ≥ 4.5 nitrate removal efficiency and the highest maximum denitrification rate were reached, the optimum C/N ratio for dosing VFAs as an external carbon source was thus determined as 4.5. In addition, denitrification capacity experiments with addition of VFAs produced from three different pH-controlled digestion reactors as an external carbon source were then conducted under an optimum C/N ratio of 4.5. As a result of the composition difference between VFAs produced from different pH environment, it was observed that, with VFAs from pH-10 digestion reactor denitrification rate was slightly higher than those with VFAs from pH-5 and none-pH-controlled digestion reactors. Furthermore, denitrification batch test using chemical tracking method was conducted to compare with manometric tracking method, and it was proven that the results obtained from manometric denitrification tests were reliable and valid. The overall results show that VFAs produced from anaerobic fermentation are an excellent external carbon source for denitrification, and it realizes the utilization of carbon resource recovery from WWTPs, which is crucial for next-generation wastewater treatment.