WATER PURIFICATION FROM HEAVY METALS USING CHLORELLA VULGARIS CULTURE
Keywords:
Chlorella vulgaris, heavy metals, wastewater.Abstract
Despite the large number of existing wastewater treatment technologies (industrial, land reclamation, domestic), the final chemical composition of wastewater entering natural reservoirs can pose a threat to their ecological state. The aim of the work was to study the use of Chlorella vulgaris microculture for wastewater treatment from soluble forms of heavy metals. The Chlorella vulgaris culture was grown in glass bioreactors on Tamiya nutrient medium. The lighting mode was constant, artificial. The bubbling was: air - from 0.05 ppm to 0.1 ppm, carbon dioxide - from 0.01 ppm to 0.05 ppm. The resulting concentrated culture was added to the volume of wastewater in a ratio of 1:5, the concentration of Chlorella vulgaris in the introduced solution was 5 x 107 cells/ml. The resulting mixture was kept for 15 days, measuring the concentration of copper, zinc, manganese and chromium on the 3rd, 5th, 10th and 15th day. It was found that in the first 5 days, the Chlorella vulgaris culture absorbed more than 50% of the initial amount of each heavy metal. At the same time, the absorption intensity depended on the initial metal concentration; when it increased to toxic values for Chlorella vulgaris, the absorption process was noticeably slowed down. At a zinc concentration of 2.5 mg/l, on the fifth day 1.5 times less metal ions were absorbed than in the case of a concentration of 0.9 mg/l. The effect of a repeated increase in the chromium concentration on the fifth day was also recorded, which we associate with the mechanisms of its absorption on the outer surface of the Chlorella vulgaris membrane. The study showed that the use of Chlorella vulgaris can become the basis of a highly effective biotechnological method for wastewater treatment from heavy metals.
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