The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Research Partnerships (PFI-RP) project includes significantly decreased costs for energy, decreased negative environmental impacts, and improved public health due to a new method for treating wastewater, known as oxygenic photogranule (OPG) technology, using microbes and natural processes. This process requires less electricity to provide oxygen for treatment ordinarily used in treating wastewater, as well as using atmospheric carbon dioxide. This could be retrofitted in the infrastructure in developed countries and could be included in new wastewater treatment facilities. For regions where wastewater treatment is absent or inadequate, sanitation via the OPG technology improves public health and the environment at a lower cost than conventional technology. This process has been demonstrated successfully at small scales, but scale-up and implementation requires the scientific and technical advancements of the proposed PFI-RP project. This project will include significant advanced training of future engineers and scientists, including underrepresented groups. Outreach to students, increased graduate study opportunities for women and minorities, and technology transfer are also benefits to society at large.
The proposed project is critical for developing commercial implementation of the new self-aerating OPG process for sustainable wastewater treatment. The OPG process has the potential to solve wastewater treatment challenges in both developing and developed countries. Despite prior advancements in photogranulation knowledge, and success of bench-scale OPG systems, process scale-up in a natural light setting recently failed after initial success. The PIs hypothesize that this outcome was due to photoinhibition of photogranulation, which has not been studied in previous OPG research. Objectives of the proposed research are to a) investigate the photoinhibition phenomenon by studying the photochemical capacity and the photosynthesis range of the OPG process, and b) to develop a fluid mixing and irradiance-based method to limit photoinhibition of OPG reactors. Integrating these critical new knowledge sets is expected to yield an innovative irradiance-based mixing scheme to control photoinhibition and support adequate oxygenic photosynthesis. Research methods include operation of batch and continuous flow reactors under different irradiance and mixing conditions and modeling of reactor hydrodynamics and OPG transport. These activities will significantly improve knowledge of photogranulation and enhance the translation of a new wastewater treatment technology to a commercial scale.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
