Granulation of filamentous microorganisms in a sequencing batch reactor with saline wastewater

Proliferation of filamentous microorganisms frequently leads to operational failure for activate sludge systems. In this study, it was found that filamentous microorganisms could grow in compact granular structure with 5% sodium chloride in the substrate. In the early period of experiment, coccoid and rode-like bacteria predominated in the yellowish-brown granules, and later the white and the black granules were developed by filamentous microorganisms. The filamentous granules exhibited low porosity and fast settling velocity, and were more compact even than bacteria granules. It was hypothesized that the elevated pH in the later period might be a possible reason for the compact growth of filamentous granules. However, the bacteria granules showed the high bioactivity in terms of specific oxygen utilizing rate, and comprised of a wider diversity of compounds based on the thermogravimetric evaluation. The findings in this study demonstrated that filamentous microbes could form compact granular structure, which may encourage the utilization of filamentous microorganisms rather than the inhibition of their growth, as the latter is frequently used for sludge bulking control.

Transformation and performance of granular sequence batch reactor under conventional organic loading rate condition

Laboratory experiments were conducted to investigate the transformation and performance of a granular sequence batch reactor(SBR) under the conventional organic loading rate(OLR) condition.Aerobic granules were successfully cultivated in a SBR by means of alternative feeding load combined with reducing settling time after 60 d operational period.Subsequently,the black fungal granules were presented in reactor because of the filamentous overgrowth on the surface of aerobic granules.A small amount of fungal granules had no effect on the performance of granular SBR.Aerobic granules completely vanished and fungal granules eventually became the dominant species in subsequent 90 d operation after granulation.The three-dimensional excitation emission matrix(EEM) spectra result shows that the extracellular polymeric substances(EPS) component in both granules has no much difference,whereas the content of EPS in fungal granules is higher than that in bacterial granules.Due to their low bioactivity,the chemical oxidation demand(COD) and NH4-N removal efficiencies gradually decrease from 90.4%–96.5% and 99.5% to 71.8% and 32.9% respectively while the fungal granules become dominant in the SBR.

A Morphologically Structured Model for Mycelial Growth and Secondary Metabolite Formation

A morphologically structured model is proposed to describe the batch fermentation of lovastatin according to the growth kinetics of filamentous microorganisms. Three kinds of hyphae are considered in the model: actively growing hyphae, non-growing hyphae and deactivated hyphae. Furthermore, actively growing hyphae consist of three morphological compartments: apical compartment which gives rise to hyphal tip extension; subapical compartment which is related to hyphal branching; and hyphal compartment which is only responsible for secondary metabolite formation. The kinetics of mycelial growth mechanism is summarized and applied in modeling lovastatin fermentation. A Michaelis-Menten kinetic model with substrate inhibition is proposed for product formation. As expected, the model simulations fit well with experimental data obtained either from a laboratory scale 10L fer-menter or from a pilot-plant scale fermenter.