Intensive shrimp farming culture results in a significant amount of waste production, primarily due to the widespread use of intensive technology. Intensive shrimp farming waste contains high amounts of nitrogen so it can reduce water quality and environmental carrying capacity. Anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) is a potential and economical nitrogen removal process. The discovery of the anammox process was a revolutionary change in conventional nitrogen removal from wastewater. Currently, many large-scale bioreactors use anammox systems around the world to treat nitrogen waste. Some of the advantages of using anammox as wastewater treatment are its high nitrogen removal capability, does not require aeration, and does not require additional carbon sources. Compared to conventional nitrification-denitrification processes, anammox can save up to 50% of oxygen requirements, 100% of organic materials, and almost 90% of waste processing operational costs. This research aims to determine the ability of anammox nitrogen removal using intensive pond sludge as an inoculum. This research can be the basis for developing a large-scale anammox bioreactor to process shrimp cultivation pond waste intensively to remove nitrogen.
Intensive shrimp pond sludge was collected at a depth of 0.5 m below the ground surface. The sludge was put into an anammox bioreactor and given high concentrations of ammonium and nitrite, namely 70-120 mg-NL-1 each, with 24-hour hydraulic retention time (HRT) for 134 days. Ammonium, nitrite, and nitrate levels were analyzed every week to monitor the influent and effluent values. The data was analyzed to obtain the values for ammonium conversion efficiency (ACE, %), nitrogen removal efficiency (NRE, %), nitrogen loading rate (NLR, kg-N/m3·d), and nitrogen removal rate (NRR, kg-N/ m3·d)
At the end of the study, the maximum nitrogen removal with parameters ACE, NRE, and NRR was 89.30%, 90.50%, and 0.23 kg-N/m3·d, respectively. The nitrogen stoichiometric ratio was 1:1.22, close to the stoichiometry of the anammox process. The anammox process has the potential to be a new technology for intensive shrimp culture wastewater treatment.
Figure 1. Nitrogen Profile
Figure 2 . Nitrogen Removal Performance