Biodegradation Of High Concentration Phenol By Pseudomonas Sp. In A Two-phase Partitioning Bioreactor

Phenolic compounds are often encountered in industrial effluents. The discharge of wastewater without proper treatment poses serious environmental problems. Thus, using a two-phase partitioning bioreactor to degrade phenol in saline solution by Pseudomonas sp. CN-6 was investigated.A strain that have capable of metabolizing phenol as a sole source of carbon and energy sources was isolated from an sludge collected from textile chemical plant in Taiwan. It was identified as Pseudomonas sp. based on its morphology, physiological, and biochemical characteristics with an automatic biometrical system and the 16S rDNA sequence analysis. To explore the applicability of this strain for bioremediation for controlling environmental phenol pollution. Microcosm study showed that the biodegradation of phenol was optimized at culture medium pH 8.5 and 30°C.Under the conditions, the strain degraded phenol completely within 17h even though the initial phenol level was high to 500 mg·L-1. Dynamic growth kinetics of suspended cells study, The value ofμmax, KS and KI were found to be 0.452 h-1, 28.617 mg·L-1, 782.4 mg·L-1 for strain CN-6 degrading phenol using Haldane's inhibition kinetic models.The novel Two-Phase Partition Bio-reactor (TPPB) was proposed to remove phenol from highly saline solutions, where the organic solvent is biocompatible and the organic–aqueous interface remains quasi-quiescent during the process. Pseudomonas sp. CN-6were selected as the biomass. Kerosene was adopted to be the organic solvent because it was biocompatible and had a suitable partition coefficient for phenol. The effect of the initial phenol level in wastewater (300–2500 mg·L-1), NaCl concentration (50–200 g·L-1) on phenol removal and cell growth was experimentally studied at 30°C. At a cell concentration of 0.023 g·L-1, it was shown that the removal of phenol from saline wastewater was more efficient at a level of 1800 mg·L-1 (an apparent removal rate of about 20 mg·L-1h-1. The overall process appeared to be favored when the salt concentration in saline solution was 100g·L-1 and agitation speed was 50rpm.