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PAO, GAO, EBPR, SBR, Fósforo, Fosfatos, Polifosfatos, Glucógeno, PHA, VFA, Metabolismo, Modelo metabólico, Cambio metabólico, Recuperación de fósoro, PAO Tipo I, PAO Tipo II, Corto plazo, Largo plazo, Estequiometría, Cinética, Monod, and TECNOLOGIA DEL MEDIO AMBIENTE

[EN] Phosphorus is very important in life because it plays an essential role in biological processes. The main use of phosphorus is in the fertilizer industry in the form of phosphates. These phosphates come mainly from phosphate rocks which might be exhausted in 50-100 years. The overexploitation of phosphate rocks has resulted in decreased quality of reserves, and it has raised the cost of extraction, processing and shipping. Moreover, phosphorus coming from wastewater, phosphate rock dissolution, and soil with an excessive supply of fertilizer, is deposited on the surface water bodies causing a serious pollution problem called eutrophication. One of the systems most used to reduced phosphorus levels in the wastewater is the enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR). This process involves capturing biologically, alternating between anaerobic oxic/anoxic conditions, the wastewater phosphorus through the phosphorus accumulating organisms (PAOs). However, one of the main problems of this process is that the glycogen accumulating organisms (GAOs) compete with PAOs for volatile fatty acids (VFA). Even though there have been many studies on the factors affecting competition between PAOs and GAOs, there are still many unanswered questions regarding the metabolism of PAOs when they lack energy reserves in the form of intracellular polyphosphates (poly-P) and its effect on the population dynamics of PAOs and GAOs in an activated sludge system. Therefore, the main goal of this dissertation is to study short- and long-term the metabolic behavior of the PAOs to different levels of poly-P; to analyze the population dynamics of microorganisms involved in the process EBPR; to model mathematically that metabolic behavior; and finally, to evaluate the possible recovery of phosphorus by extracting poly-P present in the PAOs. In the short- and long-term study was observed a metabolic shift correlates with the content in poly-P so that under low contents of poly-P the PAOs are able to behave as GAOs but without a significant development of the GAO population. Although, in both studies was observed the same metabolic behavior, from the microbiological point of view were observed some differences. In the short-term, the PAO Type II clearly showed the metabolic shift, while long-term were the PAO Type I. From the experiments performed, necessary expressions (stoichiometric and kinetic) were developed to include new behaviors observed (metabolic rate) in metabolic models existing today. Monod type expressions were developed and implemented on the model of the PAOs to represent the change between the typical stoichiometric parameters of PAO and GAO metabolism. The model was calibrated and validated showing the ability to correctly represent the metabolic change of PAOs under low concentrations of poly-P. When was observed that with low concentrations of poly-P the PAOs have the ability to change its metabolism, without the process was deteriorated by the development of the GAO population, two operating strategies were evaluated to obtain a stream rich in phosphorus to allow later retrieval. The strategies studied differed in the level of extraction of the poly-P from PAOs. In the first strategy, it was extracted less than 40 % of poly-P, while the second strategy, it came to extract more than 90 % of poly-P. The second strategy showed a higher extraction efficiency, achieving recover up to 81 % of the phosphorus present in the wastewater. As a result, of work performed four articles were generated, three of them published in journals of particular importance (2 in the journal Water Research and 1 in the journal Chemical Engineering Journal) constituting the main body of this thesis.

PAO, GAO, EBPR, SBR, Fósforo, Fosfatos, Polifosfatos, Glucógeno, PHA, VFA, Metabolismo, Modelo metabólico, Cambio metabólico, Recuperación de fósoro, PAO Tipo I, PAO Tipo II, Corto plazo, Largo plazo, Estequiometría, Cinética, Monod, and TECNOLOGIA DEL MEDIO AMBIENTE