Comparison between inhibitor and uncoupler for minimizing excess sludge production of an activated sludge process

Abstract

In order to study the minimization of excess sludge production, the reduction in the excess sludge production in the presence of an inhibitor and uncoupler was studied in this work. The experimental results show that such an addition could effectively reduce the production of excess sludge. With the energy uncoupling model established in this work, energy uncoupling coefficient (E_µ) was used to evaluate the reduction in excess sludge production. The energy uncoupling coefficients in the presence of dinitrophenol (dNP), Zn²⁺, and Cu²⁺ was 0.75, 0.46, and 0.18, respectively. The analysis demonstrated that energy spilling occurred in the presence of dNP, and that dNP was an effective uncoupler for reducing the production of excess activated sludge without affecting the microbial respiration activity.