Application of bioaugmentation to improve the activated sludge system into the contact oxidation system treating petrochemical wastewater

In this paper, bioaugmentation was applied to upgrade a full-scale activated sludge system (S2) into a contact oxidation system (S1). Results showed that when chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia nitrogen (NH₄⁺-N) concentration of the petrochemical wastewater were 320-530 mg/L and 8-25 mg/L, respectively, the bioaugmented process (S1) took only 20 days when they were below 80 mg/L and 10 mg/L, respectively. However, the unbioaugmented conventional activated sludge process (S2) spent 30 days to reach the similar effluent quality. As the organic loading rate (OLR) increased from 0.6 to 0.9 and finally up to 1.10 kg COD/m³ d, S1 showed strong resistance to shock loadings and restored after three days compared to the seven days required by S2. Based on the results of this paper, it shows that bioaugementation application is feasible and efficient for the process upgrade due to the availability of the bioaugmented specialized consortia.