SBIR Phase I: Enhanced Biocatalytic Selenium Removal from Water and Wastewater

该项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是提供一种新的低成本、高性能技术来去除水中的硒，从而有助于实现保护公众健康和维护自然生态系统的国家目标。虽然硒是一种必需的微量元素，但过量的硒会导致头发和皮肤变化，胃肠道症状，以及对神经，肾脏和肝脏组织的损害。低至十亿分之1.5的硒水平会导致水生生物的有毒生物积累，危及食物链和生态系统平衡。虽然现有法规将水中的硒浓度限制在十亿分之五十，但工业废水（例如烟道气脱硫，采矿废水，燃煤电厂）通常需要达到十亿分之十以下的水平。使用现有技术，满足这些非常低的限制通常是无法实现的或昂贵得令人望而却步。在初步结果中，所提出的技术显示出作为一种强化的、有针对性的、稳健的和高性能的生物处理技术的前景，与现有技术相比，其预计成本大幅降低。这是第一次将微生物培养开发中的新方法与材料科学相结合的除硒技术，这有助于我们进一步了解如何沿着沿着跨学科的路线进行技术创新，以缓解硒污染等广泛存在的问题。满足市场对更有效、可靠和具有成本效益的技术的广泛和日益增长的需求，以从水和废水中去除硒。虽然存在各种化学，生物和物理方法来去除水中的硒，但高成本和日益严格的监管推动了新技术的努力。这项工作的第一个组成部分是研究硒的生物转化，并在微生物培养开发中应用最先进的技术。在培养物开发之后，开发了具有特定功能的新型合成生物催化剂复合材料，作为部署和增强技术应用稳健性的方法。最后，构建生物催化技术的原型并进行彻底测试，以评估工业和经济相关的操作参数。拟议的第一阶段工作评估了新的硒处理技术的可行性和适用性，包括确定微生物特性，动力学参数和工艺设计。总的来说，该项目将促进我们对微生物硒减少的理解，为工业废水处理提供改进的工艺，并展示水和废水处理领域应用技术的多学科合作的有效性。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project will be the availability of a new low-cost, high performance technology to remove selenium from water, thereby contributing to national goals for protecting public health and maintaining natural ecosystems. While selenium is an essential trace element, excess selenium can lead to hair and skin changes, gastrointestinal symptoms, and damage to nervous, kidney and liver tissue. Selenium levels as low as 1.5 parts-per-billion result in toxic bioaccumulation in aquatic life, endangering the food chain and ecosystem balance. While existing regulations limit selenium concentrations in water to 50 parts-per-billion, industrial effluents (e.g. flue gas desulfurization, mining wastewater, coal power plants) are often required to achieve levels below 10 parts-per-billion. Meeting these very low limits is often unachievable or prohibitively expensive using existing technologies. In preliminary results, the proposed technology shows promise as an intensified, targeted, robust, and high performance biological treatment technology with substantially lower projected costs compared to the state-of-the-art. This is the first time that a technology for selenium removal combines novel methods in microorganism culture development with materials science, which helps further our understanding of how technical innovation along interdisciplinary lines can be applied for alleviating such widespread problems as selenium pollution.This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is a multidisciplinary approach to respond to a widespread and increasing market demand for more effective, reliable and cost-efficient technologies for removing selenium from water and wastewater. While a variety of chemical, biological, and physical methods exist to remove selenium from water, high costs and increasingly stringent regulation drive an effort for new technologies. This first component of this work investigates selenium biotransformation and applies state-of-the-art techniques in microorganism culture development. Following culture development, novel synthetic biocatalyst composites with specific functionalities are developed as a method for deploying and enhancing the robustness of the technology application. Finally, a prototype of the biocatalytic technology is constructed and thoroughly tested to evaluate industrially- and economically-relevant operating parameters. The proposed Phase I work assesses the feasibility and suitability of the new selenium treatment technology, including determination of microbial characteristics, kinetic parameters, and process design. Overall, this project stands to advance our understanding of microbial selenium reduction, provide an improved process for industrial wastewater treatment, and demonstrate the effectiveness of multidisciplinary collaboration for applied technologies in the water and wastewater treatment sector.