Recently, “Carbon neutrality” has become a big name worldwide due to global climate change and thus, it is of great importance to minimize carbon emission for sustainable development in the world. As a part of carbon neutrality, resource recovery and energy production in different industries have gained much attention in environmental engineering. Many researchers have recently focused on ammonia from public environmental infrastructures because of potentials of ammonia as nutrients and resources for energy production. As known, ammonia is the second-largest product in the world and has various advantages and disadvantages such as fertilizers, malodorous substances, hydrogen production, and sources of nitrogen for plants. In public environmental infrastructures, including wastewater treatment facilities, ammonia is a compound, which must be removed, but it becomes a resource to produce hydrogen or electricity by combining with ammonia electrolysis/fuel cells. Therefore, there is a need to develop a reliable technology to recover ammonia from wastewater treatment plants.<br/>Recently, electrodialysis (ED) has become a promising technology for ammonia recovery because ED requires relatively low energy consumption compared to biological treatment and it can readily concentrate ammonia to certain levels for its use as nutrients or source compounds for ammonia electrolysis/fuel cells. However, due to complex components in wastewater such as organic matter, metal ions, and inorganic salts, there are many problems, including fouling and scaling, to lower the efficiency of ED for ammonia recovery that must be appropriately solved.<br/><br/>In this study, the effective separation of ammonia from wastewater treatment plants by ED was investigated. The effects of different operating parameters, such as electrical powers, volume ratios of dilution and concentrates, and flow rates of feed stocks, on ammonia separation by ED were investigated. The efficiency of ED for ammonia recovery was characterized with different techniques, including UV-vis spectrophotometer, inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer and gas chromatography. In addition, we evaluated properties of ion exchange membranes, such as permselectivity, resistance, and ion exchange capacity. In this presentation, the obtained results of ED operation and the membrane characterization at different operating conditions as well as various real wastewater will be provided and discussed in detail.

Electrodialysis processes for ammonia recovery in public environmental infrastructures

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