TY - JOUR ID - TI - Effect of ultrasonic pretreatment on anaerobic digestion and its sludge dewaterability AU - Huacheng Xu AU - Pinjing He AU - Guanghui Yu and Liming Shao VL - 23 IS - 9 PB - SP - 1472 EP - 1478 PY - JF - Journal of Environmental Sciences JA - J. Environ. Sci. UR - http://www.jesc.ac.cn/jesc_en/ch/reader/view_abstract.aspx?file_no=2011230909&flag=1 KW - anaerobic digestion; capillary suction time; extracellular polymeric substances; sludge dewaterability; ultrasonic pretreatment AB - To investigate the effect of ultrasonic pretreatment on anaerobic digestion and sludge dewaterability and further to probe into the influencing factors on sludge dewaterability, sludge flocs were stratified into four fractions: (1) slime; (2) loosely bound extracellular polymeric substances (LB-EPS); (3) tightly bound EPS (TB-EPS); and (4) EPS-free pellets. The results showed that ultrasonic pretreatment increased the anaerobic digestion efficiency by 7%–8%. Anaerobic digestion without ultrasonic pretreatment deteriorated the sludge dewaterability, with the capillary suction time (CST) increased from 1.42 to 47.3 (sec L)/g-TSS. The application of ultrasonic pretreatment firstly deteriorated the sludge dewaterability (normalized CST increased to 44.4 (sec L)/g-TSS), while subsequent anaerobic digestion offset this effect and ultimately decreased the normalized CST to 23.2 (sec L)/g-TSS. The dewaterability of unsonicated sludge correlated with protein (p = 0.003) and polysaccharide (p = 0.004) concentrations in the slime fraction, while that of sonicated sludge correlated with protein concentrations in the slime and LB-EPS fractions (p < 0.05). Fluorescent excitationemission matrix analysis showed that the fluorescence matters in the LB-EPS fraction significantly correlated with sludge dewaterability during anarobic digestion. ER -