By Sadie Hadrill (MRes Student)
Freshwater is essential for life on Earth, and the role of freshwater is fundamental to society and for maintaining healthy ecosystems. Biological filtration is a sustainable biotechnology used to remediate biological and chemical contaminants within water. This is performed by establishing polymicrobial biofilms (diverse microbial communities) on a granular substrate, that can be housed within a column, here referred to as a biofilter. Biofilters develop efficient sorptive (attachment) capacity within diverse microbial communities of biofilms.
Filtration media has come in many forms prior to recent experimentation including sand, charcoal and granular activated carbon. Different filter media properties, including permeability, surface area and porosity, can determine the performance of the biofilter. As such, practical knowledge is needed regarding the impact of the type of filter media used. In this example we used ceramic media, more specifically terracotta clay, varying in porosity as described in the previous blog post. The team at UWE’s Centre for Print Research (CFPR) created ceramic media of low, medium and high porosities to determine the impact of porosity on the biofilter systems.
Biofilter maturation
The three variations of ceramic media were equally distributed into three individual filter columns (9 filters in total) and connected to 25 L tanks containing tap water. To aid the beginning stages of biofilm maturation, the water tanks were inoculated with pond water to introduce environmental organisms.
Over four weeks of biofilm maturation, the biofilters were monitored weekly for nutrient concentrations (such as phosphates and nitrates) and bacteria. Samples were extracted from both the filter media and the circulation water for analysis.
An investigation of porosity of media and pathogen removal
Once the biofilters had undergone maturation, the experiment investigated the removal of Escherichia coli (E. coli)and Enterococci, both are bacterial indicators of faecal contamination. Over a 24-hour period pond water was circulated through the biofilters containing the different porosity ceramic media. Samples of the circulated pond water were collected every three hours and analysed for the presence of the E. coli and Enterococci.
Preliminary results indicated a decline in both E. coli and Enterococci recovered from samples taken over a 24-hour period. However, initial findings suggest that the ceramic media porosity has little impact on E. coli and Enterococci removal as there was little difference between the bacteria counts for the three different porosities of ceramic media.
Further experimental work is ongoing to explore pathogen removal in more detail and to determine if the size of the ceramic media (e.g. smaller ceramic beads) impacts the performance of the biofilter.