Culturing sludge fermentation liquid-driven partial denitrification in two-stage Anammox process to realize advanced nitrogen removal from mature landfill leachate.

The two-stage partial nitrification (PN)-Anammox process, during long term treatment of high-ammonia nitrogen leachate, faces challenges such as the adaptation of nitrite oxidation bacteria (NOB) and failure of real-time control of pH. Resultant instabilities including NH-N and NO-N accumulation were overcome by culturing sludge fermentation liquid (SFL)-driven partial denitrification (PD) in situ in the Anammox process. Biodegradation of slowly biodegradable organics (SBO) in SFL created organics restriction condition, which limited the activity of denitrification bacteria and achieved its balance with Anammox bacteria. Produced NO-N is reduced to NO-N through PD, which further improved the removal of NH-N through Anammox. NO-N was utilized timely by Anammox bacteria, which avoid further reduction of NO-N to N, and result in a high nitrate to nitrite transformation ratio (NTR) of 93.3%. Satisfactory nitrogen removal efficiency (NRE) and nitrogen removal rate (NRR) of 99.6% and 822.0 ± 9.0 g N/(m∙d) were obtained, respectively. Key genera related to degradation of SBO, PD and Anammox were enriched. The value of narG/(nirK+nirS) increased from 0.05 on day 1-0.15 on day 250. Combining SFL-driven PD with two-stage Anammox process provided a novel insight for applying this process to realize advanced nitrogen removal in practical engineering.