Phosirikul Nichakul, Visvanathan Chettiyappan, Rene Eldon R
Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Change, School of Environment, Resources and Development, Asian Institute of Technology, P. O. Box 4, Khlong Luang, Pathumthani 12120, Thailand.
Department of Water Supply, Sanitation and Environmental Engineering, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Westvest 7, 2601DA Delft, the Netherlands.
Bioresour Technol. 2023 May;376:128824. doi: 10.1016/j.biortech.2023.128824. Epub 2023 Mar 5.
A laboratory scale air membrane bioreactor (aMBR) was used to treat a gas-phase mixture of methanol (MeOH) and acetonitrile (ACN), with an inoculum comprising of a mixed culture of microorganisms. The aMBR was tested under both steady-state and transient modes, with inlet concentrations ranging from 1 to 50 g/m for both compounds. Under steady-state conditions, the aMBR was operated at various empty bed residence times (EBRT) and MeOH:ACN ratios, while intermittent shutdown was tested during transient-state operations. The results showed that, the aMBR demonstrated > 80% removal efficiencies for both MeOH and ACN. An EBRT of 30 s was found to be the best treatment time for the mixture, providing>98% removal, with<20 mg/L of the pollutant accumulation in the liquid-phase. The microorganisms also showed preferential utilization of ACN compared to MeOH from the gas-phase and good resilience capacity after three days of shutdown/re-start operation.
