Purple non-sulphur bacteria (PNSB) are phototrophic bacteria currently under study in the wastewater treatment sector due to their performant nutrient and resource recovery. Until recently, most of researches have focused on closed anaerobic photobioreactors resulting in high sel
...
Purple non-sulphur bacteria (PNSB) are phototrophic bacteria currently under study in the wastewater treatment sector due to their performant nutrient and resource recovery. Until recently, most of researches have focused on closed anaerobic photobioreactors resulting in high selectivity of PNSB and appealing hydrogen, microbial proteins, and carotenoids productivity. Unfortunately, these researches also showed that the implementation of this technology is hampered by its relatively high costs. As is the case for microalgae technology, raceway reactors could possibly overcome this problem thanks to their low investment and maintenance costs. However, a survey of the scientific literature shows that only few researches have investigated the application of PNSB technology with open raceway reactors and that the limited available mechanistic models do not consider the specific conditions which characterize these reactors. Therefore, this study aims to construct a mechanistic mathematical model which includes the mixotrophic metabolism of PNSB and could be used to predict the nutrient removal and recovery and PNSB relative abundance in the raceway reactor. The model was structured mainly considering the photoorganoheterotrophic and respiring chemoorganoheterotrophic growth of PNSB competing with standard (an)aerobic-respiring and fermenting chemoorganoheterophic bacteria under semi-aerobic conditions. The model was tuned with seven batch and sequencing batch reactor (SBR) laboratory experiments. It simulates the reactor performance (COD removal rate 480-780 mgCOD/L/d, yield 0.40– 0.65 mgCODx/mgCODs) and the relative PNSB abundance (10-60%) under different operational conditions (light, dissolved oxygen, surface area) with a relative error around ± 20%. This research proposes an one-at-the-time sensitivity analysis, analysing the impact of those variables (TSS, SRT, COD, light, and biotic competition) which could play an important role in real-case scenarios. From this analysis, it emerged that influent suspended solids (TSS>250 mgTSS/L), hourly variations of the natural light cycle intensity and drops of the available soluble substrate (COD<1000mgCOD/L) could strongly disturb the abundance of PNSB in the system (from 48% to 10%). An extension of the sludge retention time, from 2 to 5 days, was observed to favour the relative abundance of PNSB (from 48% to 60%) and to increase the TSS productivity (from 235 to 400 mgTSS/L/d). The model was intended as a first attempt to simulate the nutrient removal and the PNSB dynamic in a raceway reactor. It has the flexibility to study the impact of the crucial parameters evidenced from the literature review (light, oxygen, carbon source). However, several implementations will be needed in the future, mainly focusing on anoxic chemoheterotrophic growth and hydrolysis.