Feasibility and performance efficiency of integrated microbial nutrient recovery cell and microalgae-activated sludge process for wastewater treatment

Microbial nutrient recovery cell (MNRC) and microalgae-activated sludge (MAAS) are both the most attractive emerging methods of wastewater treatment technology due to their promising potential to revolutionize wastewater treatment systems. However, despite this giant stride both methods still have some limitations. To address some of these limitations such as energy cost-effectiveness and improved bio-resource recovery, this research integrated both MASS and MNRC for its feasibility studies and performance efficiency. Three sets of reactors including an MNRC-based reactor named microbial nutrient recovery cell (MNRC) reactor; and two MAAS photobioreactors (PBRs) at varying mix ratios of wastewater and pre-cultured microalgae; PBRI (80:20) and PBRII (70:30) were studied. Notably, the pre-cultured microalgae applied in the PBRs were inoculated with nutrients recovered from the MNRC encouragements representing the integrated MNRC-MAAS system. The outcome of microalgae preculture using recovered nutrients presents a chlorophyll concentration of 5.8 mg/L and dissolved (DO) saturation concentration of 14.33 mg/L with a person coefficient of correlation (r) of 0.99, The performance efficiency of the integrated MNRC-MAAS with PBRI(80:20) mix ratio by volume of Wastewater and Microalgae has a higher cumulative percentage removal efficiency of BOD₅, NH₄, NO_3, and PO₄ of 98.07 %, 92.05 % 88.07 %, and 90.96 % after 18 days hydraulic retention reactors compared to PBR(70:30) ratio. Consequently, The integrated MNRC-MAAS process has become an attractive alternative wastewater bioremediation with efficient resource recovery.