The production of hydrogen gas from the biological degradation of organic waste has been studied extensively as a potential source of renewable energy. Nevertheless, several major hurdles to large-scale production and non-centralized applications have yet to be resolved. One such barrier is the design of efficient, stable, and resilient cultures that are impervious to shock loading of organic as well as inorganic inhibitory agents. Significant work has been performed on encapsulating bacterial cultures with the goal of de-coupling the hydraulic and solids retention times in biogas reactors, leading to more efficient gas production as well as enabling the retention of specific bacterial species. Again, however, hurdles exist, particularly with microbial encapsulation in organic gels (i.e., cellulose or alginate). These are (1) the leakage of bacteria out of the gel matrix and into the bulk solution and (2) the bacterial degradation of the gel matrix, both of which lead to significant biomass loss. In addition, it is postulated that encapsulation will provide the benefit of microbial resilience and resistance to inhibition as a result of the high biomass levels present when encapsulated.<br/>                This work focuses on comparing the resilience as well as the recovery of encapsulated vs. suspended growth biohydrogen-producing cultures to shock loads of ammonia, copper, chloroform, and octanoic acid. The degree of inhibition (measured as the inhibitor concentration at which a 50% reduction in hydrogen gas production is observed) as well as the time to recovery (after the inhibitor concentration is reduced) were compared for various sol-gel encapsulation compositions, and the results were compared to those for suspended growth cultures.<br/>

Resource recovery from high strength wastewater: Evaluating the resilience of multilayer composite-encapsulated bacterial cultures

254th National Meeting (2017)

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