Engineering low-cost, low-energy decentralized anaerobic wastewater treatment processes by guided evolution of microbial communities

通过微生物群落的引导进化设计低成本、低能耗的分散式厌氧废水处理工艺

• 批准号: 1990983
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Glasgow
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2018 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-1990983
• 关键词: Engineering; low; cost; energy; decentralized

It is estimated that today as many as 2.4 billion people live without access to improved sanitation with rural areas home to 7 out of 10 people living without access. The prevailing paradigm of energy and water intensive centralised wastewater treatment (WWT) systems typified in the Global North renders current technologies not only unsuitable for address of the sanitation crisis experienced by the rural poor, but is increasingly recognised as unsustainable even in energy and water rich economies. As such, there is an urgent need to develop low-cost, low-energy decentralized wastewater treatment systems. Anaerobic digestion (AD) is a biological treatment process enabling stabilisation of wastes by removal of organics from the waste stream. Further,AD has the potential to operate with a net energy gain as anaerobic microbes convert organics to methane gas, a readily storable form of renewable energy. However AD processes are notoriously fickle in the treatment of variable waste streams, so much so, that even in the Global North where centralisation provides a degree of redundancy in the wastewater infrastructure, AD is rarely if ever applied to the treatment of raw sewage. Recent advances in molecular biology are now enabling new insights to the complex microbial communities found in WWT systems. Many published studies point to the importance of the seed community in relation digester colonisation, and hence to the efficiency and stability of biological processes. Yet to date, no rational methodology exists to optimise microbial community composition in the the seed sludge for AD technologies. This project aims to couple application of 'WASTEBOT', a novel robotics platform developed at UoG, with an environmental 'omics approach to evolve and characterize optimal microbial communities for use as seed sludge in AD. The efficacy of the optimized seed communities to deliver robust and predictable treatment will be tested in-situ in novel household-scale digesters serving rural communities in boththe global south in collaboration with Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand, and, in the global north via collaboration with Scottish Water. If successful, the optimization procedure has potential to improve confidence across a range of low-cost, low-energy digester types and thus deliver much needed solutions to the sanitation crisis.

据估计，今天有多达24亿人无法获得改善的卫生设施，而农村地区每10人中就有7人无法获得改善的卫生设施。以全球北方为代表的能源和水密集型集中式废水处理（WWT）系统的流行模式使当前技术不仅不适合解决农村贫困人口所经历的卫生危机，而且越来越多地被认为是不可持续的，即使在能源和水资源丰富的经济体中。因此，迫切需要开发低成本、低能耗的分散式废水处理系统。厌氧消化（AD）是一种生物处理工艺，通过从废物流中去除有机物来稳定废物。此外，由于厌氧微生物将有机物转化为甲烷气体，这是一种易于储存的可再生能源形式，因此AD具有净能量增益的潜力。然而，AD工艺在处理可变废物流方面是众所周知的变化无常，以至于即使在集中化在废水基础设施中提供一定程度冗余的全球北方，AD也很少应用于原污水的处理。分子生物学的最新进展使人们对污水处理系统中复杂的微生物群落有了新的认识。许多已发表的研究指出了种子群落在消化池定殖中的重要性，从而提高了生物过程的效率和稳定性。然而，迄今为止，没有合理的方法存在，以优化微生物群落组成的种子污泥AD技术。该项目旨在将UoG开发的新型机器人平台“WASTEBOT”的应用与环境组学方法相结合，以发展和表征最佳微生物群落，用于AD中的种子污泥。优化的种子群落提供强大和可预测的处理的功效将在新型家庭规模的消化器中进行现场测试，这些消化器服务于全球南部的农村社区，与泰国的亚洲理工学院合作，并通过与苏格兰水务公司合作在全球北部进行。如果成功，优化程序有可能提高对一系列低成本，低能耗消化器类型的信心，从而为卫生危机提供急需的解决方案。