Section Three.
B. AEROBIC BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES
2. BIOAUGMENTATION
70    APPLICATION OF BIOAUGMENTATION IN BIOLOGICAL
WASTEWATER TREATMENT: AN EVALUATION OF
EFFECTIVENESS
Tong Yu, Research Associate
Yung-Tse Hung, Professor
Department of Civil Engineering
Cleveland State University
Cleveland, Ohio 44115
INTRODUCTION
Bioaugmentation is the addition of bacterial cultural products containing different strains of microorganisms to wastewater with the purpose of providing a sufficient quantity and diversity of microorganisms which can help improve the treatment performance of the wastewater treatment system.'
The application of bioaugmentation in wastewater treatment was originally the result of efforts to
solve some urgent operational problems, such as shock loading in wastewater treatment plants or to
make a remedial response to spilling emergencies. Some examples of these cases are listed in Table I.2"4
In these cases addition of the bacterial cultural products either helped return the operation of the plant to
normal or helped reduce greatly the danger of the spilling pollutant. These and some other successful
applications have stimulated the application of bioaugmentation to municipal wastewater treatment
facilities with the hope of improving the general performance of the treatment facilities.5-8 They have
also led researchers to conduct various laboratory studies aimed at a better understanding of
bioaugmentation.
Chambers investigated the use of bioaugmentation in three cases: an extended aeration system, an
aerated lagoon system, and an oxidation ditch system.' Use of bioaugmentation technique in these three
cases was shown to improve the waste removal efficiencies and performance stability of these wastewater
treatment systems.
Martin and Zall examined the effectiveness of bioaugmentation in the treatment of dairy wastewater
with bench-scale reactors.10 Their results showed that there was no substantial difference between the
performance of bioaugmented and control reactors. This is possibly due to the long hydraulic detention
time used in the experiments. However, because proliferation of the filamentous microorganisms and the
resulting development of sludge bulking occurred in the experiments, a general conclusion as to whether
bioaugmentation is ineffective in the treatment of dairy processing wastewater could not be drawn.
The objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of bioaugmentation in the biodegradation
of: (1) sludge produced in wastewater treatment plants, (2) the three main compositions in general
organic wastewater: carbohydrates, proteins and lipids, (3) toxic organic compounds, under the applied
experimental conditions. The purpose is to get a better understanding of bioaugmentation.
EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH
In this study, bench-scale batch activated sludge reactors which have a mixed liquid volume of 3 liters
were used and were operated with sufficient dissolved oxygen concentration and neutral pH at a
temperature of 20°C. The activated sludge taken from the returned sludge at Painesville Wastewater
Treatment Plant, Painesville, Ohio, was used in certain reactors. Live Liquid Micro-Organism (LLMO),
a commercially available cultural product, including its three different types named G-l, S-l and N-l,
from General Environmental Science (GES) Corp," was used for bioaugmentation. Analysis for the
46th Purdue Industrial Waste Conference Proceedings, 1992 Lewis Publishers, Inc., Chelsea, Michigan 48118.
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