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Updated: Feb 26, 2026

A Novel Bioreactor for High Density Cultivation of Diverse Microbial Communities
Published on: December 25, 2015
Comparative evaluation of nitrogen and phosphorus cycling, microbial community development, and N2O emissions in
Johanna Geesey1, Benyamin Chahkandi2, Bogna Sniatała2
1BioWAVE, Biochemical Wastewater Valorization and Engineering, Faculty of Applied Engineering, University of Antwerp, Groenenborgerlaan 171, 2020 Antwerpen, Belgium.
Abstract:
Aerobic granular sludge (AGS) offers compact and resource-efficient biological nitrogen and phosphorus removal, yet emissions of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) remain a key sustainability concern. This study investigates the long-term performance of AGS under two fundamentally different aeration strategies, stimulating mechanistically distinct nutrient removal regimes. The results show a clear link between aeration-induced microbial community adaptation and long-term N2O emission performance, demonstrating that the aeration strategy, not the dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration alone, governs N2O dynamics. SBR 1, operated under sequential aerobic-anoxic conditions, exhibited higher N2O emissions (7.9 ± 2.5 % of influent N) than SBR 2, adapted to low-DO continuous aeration (2.1 ± 0.8 % of influent N). Emissions from SBR 1 rose dramatically during periods of instable P removal, while granule stability and shortcut denitrification were crucial in SBR 2. This work uniquely disentangles the role of long-term aeration management in achieving stable, low-emission nutrient removal.
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