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Li-qiu Zhang [1; 2] and Pei-fen He [1] and Dan Wu [1] and Shu-geng Li [2; 3] and Yi-liang Huang [1] and You-wen Huang [1] and Deng-min Wang [1]

Academic Editor: Bin Ma

1, School of Civil Engineering, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou 510006, China, gzhu.edu.cn

2, Key Laboratory for Water Quality and Conservation of the Pearl River Delta, Ministry of Education, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou 510006, China, moe.edu.cn

3, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou 510006, China, gzhu.edu.cn

Received Oct 27, 2017; Accepted Nov 22, 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

Recently, with the constant development of social economies and urbanization, significant pressures have been placed on our environment resources. An example of this is the discharge of wastewater and water pollutants into the aquatic environment, from both domestic, agricultural and industrial sources, posing a major threat to water resources and aquatic environment. In particular, the level of discharge of nitrogen containing sewage has increased rapidly, while the phenomenon of low carbon source wastewater is becoming an increasingly common issue, causing major problems in sewage treatment plants and causing the need for upgrading and retrofitting [1–3].

At present, sewage treatment plants generally use a liquid carbon source for denitrification, such as carbinol, acetic acid, or amylaceum, although some shortcomings exist with this method. It can be difficult to accurately control the quantities of carbon sources, with complicated operation procedures, and there is a risk of causing secondary organic pollution of effluent, which will greatly increase the cost of pretreatment systems [4–7]. Therefore, there is much current research focus on the optimization of denitrification technologies and understanding the role of solid carbon sources [8–12].

This study assesses synthetic low carbon sewage treatment, using corncob as an agricultural solid waste material providing an external solid carbon source. The release of carbon and heavy metals were quantified, allowing the safety and performance of corncob organic matter to be assessed. The effectiveness of varying quantities of solid carbon source in the removal of NH4+-N and TN was assessed during simultaneous nitrification and denitrification in a sequencing biofilm...

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