Sustainable Wastewater Treatment & Resource Recovery from Biowastes
Ammonia Recovery From Digestate and Wastewater
Anayo Ukwuani investigated the kinetics of ammonia mass transfer and effects of temperature, pH and salinity on thermal stripping coupled with acid absorption for ammonium sulfate production with filtrate of anaerobically digested and undigested dairy manure. A laboratory vacuum thermal stripping - acid absorption system was used to evaluate ammonia stripping kinetics and the combined effects of vacuum and temperature on ammonia recovery from anaerobically digested dairy manure. Sohaib Anwar performed a cost-benefit analysis of our ammonia recovery technology, taking Twin Birch Dairy LLC as an example. A 10-gallon vacuum stripping - absorption (VaSA) prototype was used by doctoral students Anayo Ukwuani and Fred Agyeman and postoctoral fellow from Turkey, Dr. Alper Bayrakdar, to develop design and operational parameters and optimize the production of ammonium sulfate crystals with digestate and ammonia-rich wastewater such as sludge digestate, foodwaste digestate, landfill leachate, and source-separated human urine. This project has won a 2015 P3 Award in the 11th National Sustainable Design Expo and received a U.S. patent No. 10,053,369 in 2018.
Fred Agyeman and Youl Han investigated the synergies of integrating VaSA into anaerobic digestion. As an NSF Innovation Corps Team, Fred Agyeman (Entrepreneurial Lead), David Gerber (Industry Mentor) and I (Technical Lead) identified market fit and developed business models for commercializing the VaSA technology. An 125-gallon VaSA system was fabricated in 2021 with Binghamton University XCEED prototyping grants and assembled with NSF I-Corps grant. Funded by NSF Partnerships for Innovation and NYS CoE in Healthy Water Solutions, Dr. Mohammad Badsha, Postdoctoral Researcher, successfully demonstrated VaSA as a scalable technology for ammonia recovery and treatment of sludge digestate at San Luis Obispo Water Resource Recovery Facility, for which City of San Luis Obispo and SUNY received California Association of Sanitation Agencies 2022 Award of Excellence in Innovation and Resilience. Dr. Badsha partnered with Cal Poly students in 2022 for pilot testing of VaSA with dairy manure and manure digestate, coupled with anaerobic digestion of dairy manure from Cal Poly Dairy. Dr. Alsayed Mostafa (Postdoctoral Researcher) and PhD students (Pubudu Wickramasinghe and Taye Hamid) validated design improvements to the scalable 3-pool boiling VaSA system with leachate at Regional Landfill, Ava, NY in summer 2023. A new prototype will be constructed with SUNY Tech Accelerator Fund in 2024, transforming the pilot system into a working prototype for onsite tests with both high-solids and low-solids waste streams. Pubudu will continue technical development while Taye on techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment.
Struvite Recovery from Digestate and Wastewater
Matthew Huchzermeier discovered a simple method to reduce Ca inteference to struvite precipitation, diagnosed the other hindrances of dairy manure filtrate, and designed and built an air-lift crystallizer. Lee Martin, Fred Agyeman and Doug Mayer tested struvite precipitation and crystallization with anaerobically digested dairy manure and municipal sludge digestate, demonstrated struvite recovery on the National Mall in the 8th National Sustainable Design Expo in April 2012. This project won the 9th Annual P3 Award! Ehsan Mazinani did laboratory experiments to identify the hindrances to struvite recovery from filtrate of anaerobically digested dairy manure. Visiting Professor Kazi P. Fattah from American University of Sharjah, UAE and I explored struvite recovery from filtrate of anaerobically digested dairy manure with our 7-L air-lift crystallizer in summer 2015.
Intern Yanru Wang from University of Alberta, Canada investigated the optimum Mg supplementation for struvite crystallization and recovered 93-96% of phosphate in human urine after complete hydrolysis of urea and human urine after vacuum stripping of ammonia. Dr. Alper Bayrakdar characterized the crystals recovered from the waterless human urine.
Aysha Iftikhar is exploring struvite recovery from source-separated human urine and sludge digestate for organic production. She led a market assessment of the technology through an NSF I-Corps Regional Course. An NSF I-Corps National Team including Fred Agyeman (EL), Aysha Iftikhar (Co-EL), Wendong Tao (TL), and James Fettig (IM) performed customer discovery and developed business models for Struvite Recovery for Organic Production (STROP) in December 2022 - January 2023. Aysha continues developing the STROP technology.
Anaerobic Digestion
Fred Agyeman tested the effects of food waste particle size and organic loading rate on methane production, digestate dewaterability, solids reduction and energy consumption in three 2-L mesophilic anaerobic digesters. Eileen Leon completed experiments investigating the microbial responses and methane production to variations in feedstock biochemical composition. Jonathan Masih-Das upgraded the lab-scale digesters with automatic biogas flowmetering, conducted batch co-digestion of food waste and dairy manure, and preliminarily examined the synergies of integrating ammonia recovery with semi-continuous co-digestion of food waste and dairy manure. Youl Han explored stability and microbial ecology of anaerobic co-digestion of dairy manure and food waste when vacuum stripping of ammonia in digestate was integrated into anaerobic digestion at increasing organic loading rates. Fred Agyeman and Youl Han investigated the inhibition of ammonia and propionic acid to anaerobic digestion. Fabiane M. Vieira, visiting PhD student from University of Campinas (Campinas/ Brazil), experimented anaerobic digestion of ionic liquid residues. Pubudu Wickramasinghe will work on thermophilic anaerobic digestion coupled with VaSA.
Pyrolysis of Biowastes for Water Treatment and Reuse
Kalyani Mer employed slow pyrolysis to produce biochar and develop methods to activate biochars that selectively adsorb the contaminants of specific concern, and investigated the mechanisms of biochar adsorption of heavy metals and PFOS.
Prospective students: PhD or MS student to develop a novel pyrolysis process for valorization of wet bioresidues.
Sustainable Wastewater Treatment
Low-dissolved oxygen biological nitrogen removal
Jianfeng Wen explored aeration control strategy, microbial kinetics, and microbial communities of low dissolved oxygen simultaneous nitrification and denitrification process at full-scale activated sludge wastewater treatment plants.