• Journal of Korean Society of Water and Wastewater
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.69-76
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• 2013

Specific growth rate and removal rate of nitrogen and phosphorus of Chlorella sorokiniana, Chlorella vulgaris, Senedesmus dimorphus those are able to metabolite mixotrophically and have high nitrogen and phosphorus removal capacity were examined. Based on the results, one microalgae was selected and conducted experiments to identify the operating factors such as pH and aeration rate. The specific growth rate and phosphorus removal rate of C. sorokiniana significantly presented as $0.29day^{-1}$ and 1.65 mg-P/L/day, while the nitrogen removal rate was high as 12.7 mg-N/L with C. vulgaris. C. sorokiniana was chosen for appropriate microalgae to applying for wastewater treatment system and was cultured in pH ranged 3 to 11. High specific growth rate and removal rate of nitrogen and phosphorus were shown at pH 7 as $0.71day^{-1}$, 7.61 mg-N/L/day, and 1.24 mg-P/L/day, respectively. The specific growth rate examined with aeration rate between 0 and 2 vvm (vol/vol-min) highly presented as $1.2day^{-1}$ with 1.5 ~ 2 vvm, while the nitrogen removal rate was elevated with 0.5 vvm as 9.43 mg-N/L/day.

• Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.135-146
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• 2020

This study was aimed to investigate the possibility of using raw and anaerobically-digested piggery wastewater as culture media for a green microalga Chlorella vulgaris (C. vulgaris). Due to high concentration of ammonia and dark color, the microalga did not grow well in this wastewater. In order to solve this problem, air stripping and NaOCl-treatment were applied to reduce the concentration of NH₃-N and the color intensity from the wastewater. Algal growth was monitored in terms of specific growth rate, biomass productivity, and nutrient removal efficiency. As a result, C. vulgaris grew without any sign of inhibition in air-stripped and 10-folds diluted anaerobically-digested piggery wastewater with enhanced biomass productivity of 0.57 g/L·d and nutrient removal of 98.7-99.8% for NH₃-N and 41.0-62.5% for total phosphorus. However, NaOCl-treatment showed no significant effect on growth of C. vulgaris, although dark color was removed greatly. Interestingly, despite that the soluble organic concentration after air stripping was still high, the biomass productivity was 4.4 times higher than BG-11. Moreover, air stripping was identically effective for raw piggery wastewater as for anaerobic digestate. Therefore, it was concluded that air stripping was a very effective method for culturing microalgae and removing nutrients from raw and anaerobically-digested piggery wastewaters.