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The biological rehabilitation of metal bearing wastewaters

Objective

To explore the feasibility of application of a new biocatalytic process to the rehabilitation of wastewaters contaminated with heavy metal.


The proposed process utilizes a totally new and novel concept in the continuous removal of waste metals as part of downstream processing. Basically, soluble metals are converted to insoluble metal phosphates by a biocatalytic which operates easily at low metal concentrations unmanageable by classical precipitation, preliminary work has shown e.g. that > 98% removal of metal ion (americium) has been achieved at an input concentration of 2.6 ppb.
The process requires relatively small amounts of off-site products, non-addition of further toxic contaminants, and may utilize other wastes such as waste carbon (organic) feedstock for biomass production and phosphate to produce the phosphate surface of the operating microbial cells while waste organophosphates may be utilized as the phosphate donor for enzymically-catalysed phosphate ligand production for metal precipitation.

Call for proposal

Data not available

Coordinator

Universidad de Salamanca
EU contribution
No data
Address
Plaza de la Merced
37008 Salamanca
Spain

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Total cost
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