Abstract
This study successfully achieved stable nitritation by adding hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) to the nitrification sludge whose nitritation stability had been destroyed. The batch experiment demonstrated that, the activity of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) was restored more rapidly than that of nitrite oxidizing bacteria (NOB) after the addition of H2O2, thereby selectively promoting AOB enrichment and NOB washout. When the H2O2 concentration was 6.25 mg/L, the NOB activity was significantly reduced and the nitrite accumulation rate (NAR) was more than 95% after 18 cycles of nitrifying sludge restoration. As a result, H2O2 treatment enabled a nitrifying reactor to recover stable nitritation performance via H2O2 treatment, with the NAR and ammonia removal efficiency (ARE) both exceeding 90%. High-throughput sequencing analysis revealed that H2O2 treatment was successful in restoring nitritation, as the relative abundance of Nitrosomonas in the nitrifying reactor increased from 6.43% to 41.97%, and that of Nitrolancea decreased from 17.34% to 2.37%. Recovering nitritation by H2O2 inhibition is a low operational cost, high efficiency, and non-secondary pollution nitritation performance stabilization method. By leveraging the varying inhibition degrees of H2O2 on AOB and NOB, stable nitrification can be efficiently restored at a low cost and without causing secondary pollution.
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Acknowledgments
This work was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (52300087) and 2023 Guangzhou Basic Research Program Basic and Applied Basic Research Project (2023A04J0912). The authors are grateful to all the people who helped complete this research and to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for improving the manuscript.
Funding
This work was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (52300087) and 2023 Guangzhou Basic Research Program Basic and Applied Basic Research Project (2023A04J0912).
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Cuilan Deng: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing original draf, Investigation. Zhenguo Chen: Writing review & editing, Supervision. Yonggan Li: Investigation. Haochuan Chen: Data curation. Yongxing Chen: Writing review & editing. Songwei Zhou: Writing review & editing. Rong Niu: Writing review & editing. Yuemin Tan: Writing review & editing.
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Deng, C., Chen, Z., Li, Y. et al. Effective recovery of the nitritation process through hydrogen peroxide. Environ Sci Pollut Res (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-33056-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-33056-9