Recently, the graduate student Fengyi Gao as the first author published the paper Calcium modified basalt fiber bio-carrier for wastewater treatment: Investigation on bacterial community and nitrogen removal enhancement of bio-nest on Bioresource Technology (IF, 7.539).
Basalt fiber is a kind of green and environmentally-friendly inorganic fiber, with the diameter on the micro-scale. Since it could form bio-nest structure with rich micro-environment in biological wastewater treatment, it has been gaining wide attention as a novel carrier medium. Given the weakness of surface properties of BF in removal efficiency, this study developed a highly biocompatible calcium-based BF (Ca-BF) serving as carrier media, based on which the microbial community in bio-nest and its ability to remove carbon and nitrogen were investigated. Compared to biofilms developed on conventional carrier media, the bio-nests built on Ca-BF carrier media exhibited significant advantages in mass transport, community heterogeneity, as well as complexity of food chain, allowing carbon and nitrogen efficiently removed. After several months of operation, the Ca-BF based bio-nests could remove 94.2% of COD and 72.2% of TN, meeting the stringent discharge standard required by the government.
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51808264), Pre-research Fund of Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center of Technology and Material of Water Treatment (XTCXSZ2020-4), National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFE0126400), National Natural Science Foundation of China (51878317 and 22005125), and Senior Talent Funding of Jiangsu University (18JDG031).
