Anaerobic ammonium oxidation, nitrification and removal of COD was studied at ambient temperature (18 °C ± 3) in an anoxic/aerobic granular sludge reactor during 390 days. The reactor was operated in ...a sequencing fed batch mode and was fed with acetate and ammonium containing medium with a COD/N ratio of 0.5 g COD/gN. During influent addition, the medium was mixed with recycled effluent which contained nitrate in order to allow acetate oxidation and nitrate reduction by anammox bacteria. In the remainder of the operational cycle the reactor was aerated and controlled at a dissolved oxygen concentration of 1.5 mg O
2/l in order to establish simultaneous nitritation and Anammox. Fluorescent in-situ hybridization (FISH) revealed that the dominant Anammox bacterial population shifted toward Candidatus “Brocadia fulgida” which is known to be capable of organotrophic nitrate reduction. The reactor achieved stable volumetric removal rates of 900 g N
2–N/m
3/day and 600 g COD/m
3/day. During the total experimental period Anammox bacteria remained dominant and the sludge production was 5 fold lower than what was expected by heterotrophic growth suggesting that consumed acetate was not used by heterotrophs. These observations show that Anammox bacteria can effectively compete for COD at ambient temperatures and can remove effectively nitrate with a limited amount of acetate. This study indicates a potential successful route toward application of Anammox in granular sludge reactors on municipal wastewater with a limited amount of COD.
► acetate oxidizing capacity of Anammox at ambient temperature conditions and low COD:N ratios. ► nitritation/anammox granular sludge system as main stream wastewater treatment processes. ► low sludge production. ► competition between Anammox and general heterotrophs for acetate.
An aerobic granular sludge (AGS) reactor was run for 280 days to study the competition between Phosphate and Glycogen Accumulating Organisms (PAOs and GAOs) at high temperatures. Numerous researches ...have proven that in suspended sludge systems PAOs are outcompeted by GAOs at higher temperatures. In the following study a reactor was operated at 30 °C in which the P-removal efficiency declined from 79% to 32% after 69 days of operation when biomass removal for sludge retention time (SRT) control was established by effluent withdrawal. In a second attempt at 24 °C, efficiency of P-removal remained on average at 71 ± 5% for 76 days. Samples taken from different depths of the sludge bed analysed using
Fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) microscopy techniques revealed a distinctive microbial community structure: bottom granules contained considerably more
Accumulibacter (PAOs) compared to top granules that were dominated by
Competibacter (GAOs). In a third phase the SRT was controlled by discharging biomass exclusively from the top of the sludge bed. The application of this method increased the P-removal efficiency up to 100% for 88 days at 30 °C. Granules selected near the bottom of the sludge bed increased in volume, density and overall ash content; resulting in significantly higher settling velocities. With the removal of exclusively bottom biomass in phase four, P-removal efficiency decreased to 36% within 3 weeks. This study shows that biomass segregation in aerobic granular sludge systems offers an extra possibility to influence microbial competition in order to obtain a desired population.
► Segregation of granular biomass occurred along the settled sludge bed. ► PAOs were prevalent at the bottom, whereas GAOs dominated at the top of the sludge bed. ► Removal of GAO dominated sludge resulted in 100% P-removal efficiencies at 30 °C. ► Selective sludge withdrawal can be used to engineer the microbial population in the reactor.
Intensifying existing urban wastewater Winkler, M-K H; van Loosdrecht, M C M
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
01/2022, Volume:
375, Issue:
6579
Journal Article
•Fullscale biodrying installation treating 150kton of sludge per year.•Generation of energy (9.3MW) from sewage sludge.•Recovery of ammonium sulphate solution 40% (w/w) (7.3kton/year) from process ...air.•Total wet sludge weight reduction by 73%.•80% Odour reduction due to a biobed.
A full-scale biodrying installation was treating 150kton (wet weight) of dewatered waste activated sludge per year. The waste was treated at thermophilic conditions (65–75°C) in a 2-step forced aeration process reducing the total wet sludge weight by 73%. The final product had a high caloric value (7700–10,400 (kJ/kg)), allowing a combustion for energy generation in external facilities. The resulting product met the European microbial and heavy metal quality standards needed for an application as organic fertilizer. The facility used <0.5MW of electricity and recovered 9.3MW from biologically produced heat, which was internally used for the heating of office buildings. Produced ammonia, originating from the microbial conversion of organic matter, was recovered from the ventilated air in an acid gas scrubber as an ammonium sulphate solution 40% (w/w) (7.3kton/year) and was sold as substitute for artificial fertilizers. The sustainability of this process is discussed relative to other sludge handling processes.
Permutation methods can provide exact control of false positives and allow the use of non-standard statistics, making only weak assumptions about the data. With the availability of fast and ...inexpensive computing, their main limitation would be some lack of flexibility to work with arbitrary experimental designs. In this paper we report on results on approximate permutation methods that are more flexible with respect to the experimental design and nuisance variables, and conduct detailed simulations to identify the best method for settings that are typical for imaging research scenarios. We present a generic framework for permutation inference for complex general linear models (glms) when the errors are exchangeable and/or have a symmetric distribution, and show that, even in the presence of nuisance effects, these permutation inferences are powerful while providing excellent control of false positives in a wide range of common and relevant imaging research scenarios. We also demonstrate how the inference on glm parameters, originally intended for independent data, can be used in certain special but useful cases in which independence is violated. Detailed examples of common neuroimaging applications are provided, as well as a complete algorithm – the “randomise” algorithm – for permutation inference with the glm.
•Permutation for the GLM in the presence of nuisance or non-independence.•A generalised statistic that performs well even under heteroscedasticity.•Permutation and/or sign-flipping, exchangeability blocks and variance groups.•The “randomise” algorithm, as well as various practical examples.
Schizophrenia is a devastating neuropsychiatric syndrome associated with distributed brain dysconnectivity that may involve large-scale thalamo-cortical systems. Incomplete characterization of ...thalamic connectivity in schizophrenia limits our understanding of its relationship to symptoms and to diagnoses with shared clinical presentation, such as bipolar illness, which may exist on a spectrum. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, we characterized thalamic connectivity in 90 schizophrenia patients versus 90 matched controls via: (1) Subject-specific anatomically defined thalamic seeds; (2) anatomical and data-driven clustering to assay within-thalamus dysconnectivity; and (3) machine learning to classify diagnostic membership via thalamic connectivity for schizophrenia and for 47 bipolar patients and 47 matched controls. Schizophrenia analyses revealed functionally related disturbances: Thalamic over-connectivity with bilateral sensory-motor cortices, which predicted symptoms, but thalamic under-connectivity with prefrontal-striatal-cerebellar regions relative to controls, possibly reflective of sensory gating and top-down control disturbances. Clustering revealed that this dysconnectivity was prominent for thalamic nuclei densely connected with the prefrontal cortex. Classification and cross-diagnostic results suggest that thalamic dysconnectivity may be a neural marker for disturbances across diagnoses. Present findings, using one of the largest schizophrenia and bipolar neuroimaging samples to date, inform basic understanding of large-scale thalamo-cortical systems and provide vital clues about the complex nature of its disturbances in severe mental illness.
We investigated the relationship between individual subjects' functional connectomes and 280 behavioral and demographic measures in a single holistic multivariate analysis relating imaging to ...non-imaging data from 461 subjects in the Human Connectome Project. We identified one strong mode of population co-variation: subjects were predominantly spread along a single 'positive-negative' axis linking lifestyle, demographic and psychometric measures to each other and to a specific pattern of brain connectivity.
Faster permutation inference in brain imaging Winkler, Anderson M.; Ridgway, Gerard R.; Douaud, Gwenaëlle ...
NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.),
11/2016, Volume:
141
Journal Article, Web Resource
Peer reviewed
Open access
Permutation tests are increasingly being used as a reliable method for inference in neuroimaging analysis. However, they are computationally intensive. For small, non-imaging datasets, recomputing a ...model thousands of times is seldom a problem, but for large, complex models this can be prohibitively slow, even with the availability of inexpensive computing power. Here we exploit properties of statistics used with the general linear model (GLM) and their distributions to obtain accelerations irrespective of generic software or hardware improvements. We compare the following approaches: (i) performing a small number of permutations; (ii) estimating the p-value as a parameter of a negative binomial distribution; (iii) fitting a generalised Pareto distribution to the tail of the permutation distribution; (iv) computing p-values based on the expected moments of the permutation distribution, approximated from a gamma distribution; (v) direct fitting of a gamma distribution to the empirical permutation distribution; and (vi) permuting a reduced number of voxels, with completion of the remainder using low rank matrix theory. Using synthetic data we assessed the different methods in terms of their error rates, power, agreement with a reference result, and the risk of taking a different decision regarding the rejection of the null hypotheses (known as the resampling risk). We also conducted a re-analysis of a voxel-based morphometry study as a real-data example. All methods yielded exact error rates. Likewise, power was similar across methods. Resampling risk was higher for methods (i), (iii) and (v). For comparable resampling risks, the method in which no permutations are done (iv) was the absolute fastest. All methods produced visually similar maps for the real data, with stronger effects being detected in the family-wise error rate corrected maps by (iii) and (v), and generally similar to the results seen in the reference set. Overall, for uncorrected p-values, method (iv) was found the best as long as symmetric errors can be assumed. In all other settings, including for familywise error corrected p-values, we recommend the tail approximation (iii). The methods considered are freely available in the tool PALM — Permutation Analysis of Linear Models.
•Permutation methods can be accelerated through additional statistical approaches.•Six approaches are described and assessed.•Methods can be 100 times faster than in the non-accelerated case.•Recommendations are provided for various common scenarios.
Settling velocity is a crucial parameter in granular sludge technology. In this study the effects of temperature and salt concentrations on settling velocities of granular sludge particles were ...evaluated. A two-fold slower settling velocity for the same granules where observed when the temperature of water decreases from 40 °C to 5 °C. Settling velocities also decreased with increasing salt concentrations. Experiments showed that when granules were not pre-incubated in a solution with increased salt concentration, they initially floated. The time dependent increase in mass and hence in settling speed of a granule due to salt diffusion into the granule was dependent on the granule diameter. The time needed for full salt equilibrium with the bulk liquid took 1 min for small particles from the top of the sludge bed and up to 30 min for big granules from the bottom of the sludge bed. These results suggest that temperature and salt concentration are important parameters to consider in the design, start-up and operation of granular sludge reactors and monitoring of these parameters will aid in a better control of the sludge management in anaerobic and aerobic granular sludge technology. The observations also give an explanation for previous reports which were suggesting that a start-up of granular sludge reactors is more difficult at low temperatures.
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► Density and viscosity of water varies at different salt concentrations and temperatures. ► High salt concentrations can lead to granular sludge floatation and sludge washout. ► Low settling velocities at low temperatures can lead to start-up problems in the winter.
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