The effectiveness of step feeding strategies in sequencing batch reactor for a single-stage deammonification of high strength ammonia wastewater

A single-stage deammonification with a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) that simultaneous nitritation, anaerobic ammonia oxidation (anammox), and denitrification (SNAD) occur in one reactor has been widely applied for sidestream of wastewater treatment plant. For the stable and well-balanced SNAD, a feeding strategy of influent wastewater is one of the most important operating factors in the single-stage deammonification SBR. In this study, single-stage deammonification SBR (working volume 30L) was operated to treat a high-strength ammonium wastewater (1200 mg NH4+-N/L) with different feeding strategies (single feeding and nine-step feeding) under the condition without COD. Each cycle of the step feeding involved 6 sub-cycles consisted of aerobic and anoxic periods for partial nitritation (PN) and anammox, respectively. Contrary to unstable performance in the single feeding, the step feeding showed better deammonification performance (0.565 kg-N/m3/day). Under the condition with COD, however, the nitrogen removal rate (NRR) decreased to 0.403 kg-N/m3/day when the Nine-step feeding strategies had an additional denitrification period before sub-cycles for PN and anammox. The NRR was recovered to 0.518 kg-N/m3/day by introducing an enhanced multiple-step feeding strategy. The strategy had 50 cycles consisted of feed, denitrification, PN, and anammox, instead of repeated sub-cycles for PN and anammox. The multiple-step feeding strategy without sub-cycle showed the most stable and excellent deammonification performance: high nitrogen removal efficiency (98.6%), COD removal rate (0.131 kg-COD/m3/day), and COD removal efficiency (78.8%). This seemed to be caused by that the elimination of the sub-cycles might reduce COD oxidation during aerobic condition but increase the COD utilization for denitrification period. In addition, among various sensor values, the ORP pattern appeared to be applicable to monitor and control each reaction step for deammonification in the multiple-step feeding strategy without sub-cycle. Further study to optimize the number of multiple-step feeding is still needed but these results show that the multiple-step feeding strategy can contribute to a well-balanced SNAD for deammonification when treating high-strength ammonium wastewater with COD in the single-stage deammonification SBR.