In this study, a biodegradation model of based on molecular cellulose was established. It is a mathematical, kinetic model, assuming that two major enzymes randomly break glycosidic bonds of cellulose molecules, and calculates the number of molecules by applying the corresponding probability and degradation reaction coefficients. Model calculations considered enzyme dose, cellulose chain length, and reaction rate constant ratio. Degradation increased almost by two folds with increase of temperature (5℃→25℃). The change of degradation was not significant over the higher temperatures. As temperature increased, the degradation rate of the molecules increased along with higher production of shorter chain molecules. As the reaction rates of the two enzymes were comparative the degree of degradation for any combinations of enzyme application was not affected much. Enzyme dose was also tested through experiment. While enzyme dose ranged from 1 mg/L to 10 mg/L, the gap between real data and model calculations was trivial. However, at higher dose of those enzymes (>15 mg/L), the experimental result showed the lower concentrations of reductive sugar than the corresponding model calculation did. We determined that the optimal enzyme dose for maximum generation of reductive sugar was 10 mg/L.

Food waste is both an industrial and residential source of pollution, and there has been a great need for food waste reduction. As a preliminary step in this study, waste reduction is quantitatively modeled. This study presents two models based on kinetics: a simple kinetic model and a mass transport-shrinking model. In the simple kinetic model, the smaller is the reaction rate constant ratio k1 , the lower the rate of conversion from the raw material to intermediate products. Accordingly, the total elapsed reaction time becomes shorter. In the mass transport-shrinking model, the smaller is the microbial decomposition resistance versus the liquid mass transfer resistance, the greater is the reduction rate of the radius of spherical waste particles. Results showed that the computed reduction of waste mass in the second model agreed reasonably with that obtained from a few experimantal trials of biodegradation, in which the microbial effect appeared to dominate. All calculations were performed using MATLAB 2020 on PC.

To evaluate the remediation performance of recycled oyster shell powders to control nutrients release from polluted sediments. Different types of recycled oyster shell powder were applied on separated bottom sediments. The first type of oyster shell powder is Calcined Oyster Shell Powder (COSP) and another consist of ultrasonicated oyster shell powder (SOSP) which were composed of calcium peroxide. The recycled oyster shell powders were improving the water quality as slow oxygen releasing compound. The experimental results indicated that the Dissolved Oxygen (DO) in the treated columns were higher than the control column. pH was increased in the both experimental columns due to the hydrolysis of CaO2. Meanwhile, recycled oyster shell powders could prevent the nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) release from sediments into the overlying water. In addition, the total nitrogen and total phosphorus concentrations of the COSP applied column were decreased 27% and 20% compared to the control column respectively and the SOSP applied column were decreased 33% and 27% compared to control in the overlying water. It was proved that, COSP and SOSP can effectively adsorb phosphorus from sediments and prevent phosphorus release into overlying water from bottom sediments. In conclusion, COSP and SOSP applications was increased DO in the overlying water and nutrient released controlled effectively from the sediment.

Contaminated marine sediment is a secondary pollution source in the coastal areas, which can result in increased nutrients concentrations in the overlying water. We analyzed the nutrients release characteristics into overlying water from sediments and the interaction among benthic circulation of nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, and sulfur were investigated in a preset sediment/water column. Profiles of pH, ORP, sulfur, iron, nitrogen, phosphorus pools were determined in the sediment and three different layers of overlying water. Variety types of sulfur in the sediments plays a significant role on nutrients transfer into overlying water. Dissimilatory nitrate reduction and various sulfur species interaction are predominantly embodied by the enhancing effects of sulfide on nitrogen reduction. Contaminant sediment take on high organic matter, which is decomposed by bacteria, as a result promote bacterial sulfate reduction and generate sulfide in the sediment. The sulfur and iron interactions had also influence on phosphorus cycling and released from sediment into overlying water may ensue over the dissolution of ferric iron intercede by iron-reducing bacteria. The nutrients release rate was calculated followed by release rate equation. The results showed that the sediments released large-scale quantity of ammonium nitrogen and phosphate, which are main inner source of overlying water pollution. A mechanical migration of key nutrients such as ammonia and inorganic phosphate was depicted numerically with Fick’s diffusion law, which showed a fair agreement to most of the experimental data.

A lipid-enriched strain of Botryococcus braunii (UTEX 572) was cultivated in a semi-batch aeration tank to enhance biomass as well as to develop intracellular lipids and fatty acids. A 30 day period of incubation produced 1.39 g/L of biomass and 0.31 g/L of total lipids in the biomass. The grown biomass was pre-treated using several methods to extract the total lipid content efficiently: ultrasonication was found to yield the highest percentage of lipids-namely 19.8% per biomass. Direct heating of biomass in an autoclave also showed better performance than when using only conventional solvent extraction. To enhance the biomass harvest and lipid extraction efficiency, coagulation and flocculation steps were added to the extraction process. It is noteworthy that not only the solvent type but also the solvent/biomass ratio greatly affected efficiency. In addition, the moisture content of the harvested(wet) biomass affected the efficiency significantly. This study elucidated the need for future research on optimizing this extraction process.

Bioremediation in situ is heavily dependent on the oxygenic environment which would privide the dwelling microorganism with sufficient oxygen. The situation could be easily resolved with supply of an Oxygen Releasing Compound (ORC). In this paper we prepared that sort of material out of oyster shell powder (mostly calcium carbonate) that prevails every shore areas of the country. We used two different oxidizing methods in the first step of the whole manufacturing process–conventional heating in a furnace and an ultrasound generator to obtain calcium oxide. Then that calcium oxide was further oxidized into calcium peroxide which may release oxygen under a moisturized condition. The oxygen releasing experiments were run to test the performance of our products, and to determine the gas kinetics during the experiments. Interestingly, calcium peroxide derived from ultrasound treatment was much more energy-effective as ORC than that from furnace heating although the heat derived process was better than that of ultrasound in terms of oxygen content and its releasing rate. We also found that most of the data collected from the gas releasing experiments fairly supported an ordinary 1st order kinetics to oxygen concentration, which shaped a sharp discharge of oxygen at the very early moment of each test.

The several functions of manufactured the gypsum incorporating oyster shell powder coated by submicro-silver solutionand carrried out the tests for the adsorption of formaldehyde and antibiotic actions. Several environmentally- friendlyarchitectural materials, clay and flyash were tested for the comparison of the adsorption efficiency. The mortar by solidifiedand dried was exposed in the small chamber for the 180min with 4000µg/m3 of the initial concentration of formaldehydeand observed high removal efficiency which result was not any difference in adsorption performance of other tested materials.The microbial flora analysis of oyster mortar coated by submicro-silver solution and the similarity test were performed andobserved that the densities of Aeromonas sp. Enterococcus sp., and Micrococcus sp. were decreased and the densities ofStaphylococcus sp., Escherichia sp., Bacillus sp., were taphylococcus sp, Escherichia sp., and Bacillus sp. were increased.

The aim of this research is to enhance the bottom environment of Geoje fish farm that has been severely contaminated. Treatment of microbial agent and/or calcium oxide significantly changed that environment: in ignition loss, either treatment (25% or 21%)showed better than mixed treatment (13.2%). In COD, the oxygen releasing agent or mixed treatment reduced the index by more than 20%. In T-P and T-N, the effects of CaO2 on them were overwhelming (50% or more) meanwhile that of the microbial agent on them was less than 20%. Also, CaO2 influenced on the microbial flora: Desulfobvibrio thermophilus, a sulfate reducing bacterium decreased in number, considering the increase of pH and rise of redox potential. In contrast, Pseudomonas sp., Pseudoalteromonas sp., Pseudomonas aeruginosa were remarkably dominant over other species with mixed treatment as a PCA analysis confirmed it.

Several tests and experimental work have been done for identifying the best growth conditions and accumulated amount of lipid moiety in B. braunii, a microalga(UTEX 572) in terms of media composition. The specific growth rate was found to be the highest at 0.15 g/L-day when the phosphorus concentration was doubled with the other ingredients at the normal level. Experiments for varied media compositions revealed that the accumulation of lipid was the highest at 48% (dry cell weight based) in the nitrogen deficient medium and its corresponding specific growth rate was comparative to that in the normal BG 11 medium. In the bubble column experiments, carbon dioxide containing air produced four times more cell mass than air only. Light and glucose addition also enhanced cell mass with maximum, 1.8 g/L and accordingly 42% of lipid composition, which turned out to be a better strategy for higher lipid-producing microalgal culture.

The aim of this paper is to correlate the release characteristics of marine and lake sediment with their vicinal oxic conditions. We performed lab-scale simulation experiments using field sediment and water in order to compare the release concentrations and the release rates one another. To provide a few different kinds of oxic environments we used natural air flow and some oxygen releasing compounds such as CaO2 and MgO2. In case of phosphates, in each oxic condition, removal of phosphorus via biological activity and that via salt precipitation with the metal ions lowered the release rates. The behavior of the nitrogen-origin salts seemed to greatly depend on the typical biological actions - growth of biomass, nitrification, and partial denitrification. Generally speaking, the control of releases of NH3-N, PO4-P, T-N and T-P was successful under the oxic conditions meanwhile COD, nitrates and nitrites were difficult to reduce the releases into the bulk water because of the considerable microbial oxidation. Based on typical diffusive mass transfer kinetics the changes of concentrations of the nutrients were computed for qualitative and quantitative comparisons.

Sediment cell is renewable energy which produces electric energy using immanent ingredients or reducing power of marine sediment as natural resources. Also the cell has an advantage that environmental pollution can be reduced through conversion of organic and inorganic contaminants into inert matter with generation of the energy. In this paper, we compared characteristics of electricity generation of the two different sediment cells, and investigated the regeneration effect of the sediment cells with manipulation of the sediment such as mixing and re-positioning. The results showed that 14.1 W/m2 of power was obtained with the aluminum electrode, and the mixing of the sediment could increase the power by 4 W/m2 compared to the control. Also, mixing the sediment has kept electricity for 4 weeks at a relatively constant level, which implied ‘fuel regeneration effect'. Meanwhile, the sediment cell was proved to be effective in reduction of COD, which was up to 28.6%.

This study was carried out in order to observe how the bay sediment would be changed with microbial treatments and a chemical oxidant like CaO2. The sediment during the treatments was analyzed in terms of pH, ORP, volatile organics content, COD, AVS, T-N, and T-P. With CaO2 treatment, pH was kept over 9.66 and ORP ranged from +4.70～+46.0, which meant an aerobic state meanwhile with the microbial treatment those were worse. In addition the chemical treatment showed better environmental index values than the microbial one: volatile organics content and COD values in the former were 12.9% and 37.9% while those in the latter were 4.5% and 18.7%, respectively. AVS and T-P were 71.1% and 100% versus 56.5% and 85.8%, respectively. However, the microbial treatment was better for T-N(66% higher). On the other hand, both treatment at a time enhanced all the environmental indices but COD meantime pH and ORP values were lower than with the chemical treatment only. Thus additional input of an oxygen generator like CaO2 could improve the environmental state of a bay sediment where the biological treatment is going on.

Rapid industrialization has brought Nam-Hae area serious environmental problems associated with released oil and other hydrocarbons. In this work, in order to enhance the quality of the shoreline sediment we made enviro-chemical analyses of its substances, TPHs and microbial growth after treating with oxygen releasing compound(ORC) such as MgO2. Total organic compound(TOC) was reduced from 33.45% to 25.1∼31.08% meanwhile COD decreased from 27.5∼28.9mg/g·dry to 19.9∼26.1mg/g·dry for input of 2∼10% MgO2 in 20days. For 10% MgO2 input, TP and TN were reduced by 13.3% and 18.8%, respectively. Most of all TPH was decomposed by max. 42.4% in 21days, and the total viable count of microbes was found to be exponentially increased by 75.9%.

We manufactured PVA-derived hydrogels using a foam generation technique that has been widely used to prepare colloidal gas aphrons(CGA). These gels were differentiated to the conventional gels such as for medical or pharmaceutical applications, which have tiny pores and some crystalline structure. Rather these should be used in de-pollution devices or adhesion of cells or biomolecules. The crosslinkers used in this work were amino acid, organic acid, sugars and lipids(vitamins). The structures of the gels were observed in a scanned electron microscope. Amino acids gels showed remarkably higher swelling ratios probably because their typical functional groups help constructing a highly crosslinked network along with hydrogen bonds. Boric acid and starch would catalyze dehydration while structuring to result in much lower water content and accordingly high gel content, leading to less elastic, hard gels. Bulky materials such as ascorbic acid or starch produced, in general, large pores in the matrices and also nicotinamide, having large hydrophobic patches was likely to enlarge pore size of its gels as well since the hydrophobicity would expel water molecules, thus leading to reduced swelling. Hydrophilicity(or hydrophobicity), functional groups which are involved in the reaction or physical linkage, and bulkiness of crosslinkers were found to be more critical to gel's crosslinking structure and its density than molecular weights that seemed to be closely related to pore sizes. Microscopic observation revealed that pores were more or less homogeneous and their average sizes were 20 μm for methionine, 10-15 μm for citric acid, 50-70 μm for L-ascorbic acid, 30-40 μm for nicotinamide, and 70-80 μm for starch. Also a sensory test showed that amino acid and glucose gels were more elastic meanwhile acid and nicotinamide gels turned out to be brittle or non-elastic at their high concentrations. The elasticity of a gel was reasonably correlated with its water content or swelling ratio. In addition, the PVA gel including 20% ascorbic acid showed fair ability of cell adherence as 0.257mg/g-hydrogel and completely degraded phenanthrene(10 mM) in 240 h.

A variety of fungal species are known to degrade cyanide through the action of cyanide hydratase, a specialized nitrilases which hydrolyze cyanide to formamide. This work is a report on two unknown and uncharacterized members from Neurospora crassa and Aspergillus nidulans. Recombinant forms of three cyanide hydratases (CHT) originated from N. crassa, Gibberella zeae, and A. nidulans were prepared after their genes were cloned with N-terminal hexahistidine purification tags, expressed in E. coli and purified using immobilized metal affinity chromatography. These enzymes were compared according to their pH activity profiles, and kinetic parameters. Although all three were similar, the N. crassa CHT has the widest pH range of activity above 50% and highest turnover rate (6.6×108 min-1) among them. The CHT of A. nidulans has the highest Km value of the three nitrilases evaluated in here. Expression of CHT in both N. crassa and A. nidulans were induced by the presence of KCN, regardless of any presence of nitrogen sources. These data can be used to determine optimal procedures for the enzyme uses in the remediation of cyanide-containing wastes.