Kang Song, Zhouyang Li, Dan Liu, Lu Li.Environmental Science & Technology 2021, 55 Insights into Nitrous Oxide Mitigation Strategies in Wastewater Treatment and Challenges for Wider Implementation. Haoran Duan, Yingfen Zhao, Konrad Koch, George F.This article is cited by 74 publications. While clearly showing that the NH 2OH related pathways could well explain N 2O production and emission in the two full-scale plants studied, the modeling results do not prove the dominance of the NH 2OH pathways in these plants, nor rule out the possibility of AOB denitrification being a potentially dominating pathway in other WWTPs that are designed or operated differently. This is the first time that mathematical modeling of N 2O emissions is conducted successfully for full-scale WWTPs.

The model is further validated with independent data sets collected from the same two WWTPs. The obtained kinetic parameters for N 2O production are found to be reasonable as the 95% confidence regions of the estimates are all small with mean values approximately at the center. The model described well the dynamic ammonium, nitrite, nitrate, dissolved oxygen (DO) and N 2O data collected from both an open oxidation ditch (OD) system with surface aerators and a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) system with bubbling aeration. In this work, a mathematical model based on currently known or hypothesized metabolic pathways for N 2O productions by heterotrophic denitrifiers and ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) is developed and calibrated to describe the N 2O emissions from full-scale WWTPs. However, information on modeling of N 2O emissions from full-scale wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) is still sparse. Mathematical modeling of N 2O emissions is of great importance toward understanding the whole environmental impact of wastewater treatment systems.

Wastewater treatment plant simulation