Cost effectiveness of phosphorus removal processes in municipal wastewater treatment.

Meeting stringent phosphorus (P) discharge standards remains one of the major challenges for wastewater utilities due to increased economic burdens associated with advanced (i.e., secondary, tertiary) treatment processes. In a trade-off between higher treatment cost and enhanced P removal, it is critical for the treatment plants to be able to select the most appropriate technology. To this end, established/emerging high performing P removal/recovery technologies (e.g., Modified University of Cape Towne process, Bardenpho process, membrane bioreactors, IFAS-EBPR, struvite recovery, tertiary reactive media filtration) were identified and full-scale treatment plant designs were developed. Using advanced mathematical modeling techniques, six different treatment configurations were evaluated in terms of performance and cost effectiveness ($/lb of P removed). Results show that the unit cost for P removal in different treatment alternatives range from $42.22 to $60.88 per lb of P removed. The MUCT BNR + tertiary reactive media filtration proved to be one of the most cost effective configurations ($44.04/lb P removed) delivering an effluent with total P (TP) concentration of only 0.05 mg/L. Although struvite recovery resulted in significant reduction in biosolids P, the decrease in effluent TP was not sufficient to meet very stringent discharge standards.

Synthesis and detection of oxygen-18 labeled phosphate.

Phosphorus (P) has only one stable isotope and therefore tracking P dynamics in ecosystems and inferring sources of P loading to water bodies have been difficult. Researchers have recently employed the natural abundance of the ratio of (18)O/(16)O of phosphate to elucidate P dynamics. In addition, phosphate highly enriched in oxygen-18 also has potential to be an effective tool for tracking specific sources of P in the environment, but has so far been used sparingly, possibly due to unavailability of oxygen-18 labeled phosphate (OLP) and uncertainty in synthesis and detection. One objective of this research was to develop a simple procedure to synthesize highly enriched OLP. Synthesized OLP is made up of a collection of species that contain between zero and four oxygen-18 atoms and, as a result, the second objective of this research was to develop a method to detect and quantify each OLP species. OLP was synthesized by reacting either PCl(5) or POCl(3) with water enriched with 97 atom % oxygen-18 in ambient atmosphere under a fume hood. Unlike previous reports, we observed no loss of oxygen-18 enrichment during synthesis. Electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) was used to detect and quantify each species present in OLP. OLP synthesized from POCl(3) contained 1.2% P(18)O(16)O(3), 18.2% P(18)O(2) (16)O(2), 67.7% P(18)O(3) (16)O, and 12.9% P(18)O(4), and OLP synthesized from PCl(5) contained 0.7% P(16)O(4), 9.3% P(18)O(3) (16)O, and 90.0% P(18)O(4). We found that OLP can be synthesized using a simple procedure in ambient atmosphere without the loss of oxygen-18 enrichment and ESI-MS is an effective tool to detect and quantify OLP that sheds light on the dynamics of synthesis in ways that standard detection methods cannot.