Biogas and phosphorus recovery from waste activated sludge with protocatechuic acid enhanced Fenton pretreatment, anaerobic digestion and microbial electrolysis cell

Huijie Hou, Zhen Li, Bingchuan Liu, Sha Liang, Keke Xiao, Qian Zhu, Shaogang Hu, Jiakuan Yang, Jingping Hu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

36 Scopus citations

Abstract

Biogas and phosphorus recovery from waste activated sludge (WAS) with sequential homogeneous protocatechuic acid (PCA) enhanced Fenton pretreatment, anaerobic digestion (AD) and microbial electrolysis cell (MEC) were investigated. The cumulation of biogas production of WAS-Fenton-AD was 330.4 mL/g VS, which was 2.05-fold of the control without pretreatment (WAS-AD) during anaerobic digestion. Biogas production of 178 mL/L/d from WAS-Fenton-AD-MEC was achieved, which was 5.23-fold of the WAS-MEC, 2.28-fold of WAS-Fenton-MEC and 1.46-fold of WAS-AD-MEC, respectively. Enhanced phosphorus recovery in form of struvite reached 1.72 g/g TS (18.03% of total P) with a purity of 74.4%. Microbial community richness and diversity analysis revealed that the pretreatment process under circumneutral condition improved the diversity of microbial community, which was consisted of Bacteroidetes (33.90%), Proteobacteria (33.14%), and Chloroflexi (10.14%), compared to a majority of Firmicutes (70.81%) in WAS-AD. This study provides a feasible strategy for the recovery of biogas combined with phosphorus from WAS.

Original languageEnglish
Article number135274
JournalScience of the Total Environment
Volume704
DOIs
StatePublished - 20 Feb 2020
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Anaerobic digestion
  • Homogeneous Fenton process
  • Microbial electrolysis cell
  • Struvite
  • Waste activated sludge

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