Simultaneous Feammox and anammox process facilitated by activated carbon as an electron shuttle for autotrophic biological nitrogen removal

Highlights

• The autotrophic nitrogen removal combining Feammox and Anammox was achieved.

• Activated carbon can be used as an electron shuttle to enhance Feammox activity.

• Fe(III) was reduced to Fe(II) and the secondary Fe(II) mineral (FeOOH) was obtained.

• The iron-reducing bacteria and Anammox consortium was enriched simultaneously.

Abstract

Ferric iron reduction coupled with anaerobic ammonium oxidation (Feammox) is a novel ferric-dependent autotrophic process for biological nitrogen removal (BNR) that has attracted increasing attention due to its low organic carbon requirement. However, extracellular electron transfer limits the nitrogen transformation rate. In this study, activated carbon (AC) was used as an electron shuttle and added into an integrated autotrophic BNR system consisting of Feammox and anammox processes. The nitrogen removal performance, nitrogen transformation pathways and microbial communities were investigated during 194 days of operation. During the stable operational period (days 126–194), the total nitrogen (TN) removal efficiency reached 82.9%±6.8% with a nitrogen removal rate of 0.46±0.04 kg-TN/m³/d. The contributions of the Feammox, anammox and heterotrophic denitrification pathways to TN loss accounted for 7.5%, 89.5% and 3.0%, respectively. Batch experiments showed that AC was more effective in accelerating the Feammox rate than the anammox rate. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analyses showed the presence of ferric iron (Fe(III)) and ferrous iron (Fe(II)) in secondary minerals. X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns indicated that secondary iron species were formed on the surface of iron-AC carrier (Fe/AC), and Fe(III) was primarily reduced by ammonium in the Feammox process. The phyla Anaerolineaceae (0.542%) and Candidatus Magasanikbacteria (0.147%) might contribute to the Feammox process, and Candidatus Jettenia (2.10%) and Candidatus Brocadia (1.18%) were the dominative anammox phyla in the bioreactor. Overall, the addition of AC provided an effective way to enhance the autotrophic BNR process by integrating Feammox and anammox.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Feammox / Anammox / Extracellular electron transfer / Electron shuttle / Activated carbon

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CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yingbin Hu: Conceptualization, Writing- Original Draft, Investigation. Ning Li: Investigation, Validation, Writing- Review & Editing. Jin Jiang: Project administration, Funding acquisition, Writing- Review & Editing, Supervision. Yanbin Xu: Validation, Writing- Review & Editing, Funding acquisition. Xiaonan Luo: Investigation, Data Curation. Jie Cao: Investigation, Data Curation.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Key Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province (China) (No. 2019B110205-004), the Program for Guangdong Introducing Innovative and Entrepreneurial Teams (China) (No. 2019ZT08L213), the Key Special Project for Introduced Talents Team of Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou, China) (No. GML2019ZD0403) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52000039).

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-021-1498-z and is accessible for authorized users.

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