Team:WHU-China/Applied Design
Applied design
We have come up with a brand new applied design. The various ecological environmental problems are essentially the change of chemical composition. There are always some chemicals that cause environmental problems due to leakage or emission. These chemicals are already diffused. In this case, we use solar energy to specifically recycle this chemical, which not only solves environmental problems, but also makes it possible to reuse these chemicals as resources. This is a very resource-environmentally sustainable approach, this year we started our project with phosphorus as an example, so we compared the current phosphorus removal method with our own method.
Current method:
Generally, the excessive phosphorus content in the environmental water is controlled by controlling the discharge of sewage. The phosphorus in the sewage is removed by the activated sludge in the sewage treatment plant, such as the AAO process. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the complete processing chain, we came to the XSH Water Co., Ltd, which is a great and comprehensive sewage treatment plant. They introduced us that since the phosphorus in the polyphosphate bacteria adsorbed into the activated sludge could not be released again. Factory generally chooses to directly fill these activated sludge in consideration of the cost.
There are some drawbacks to this approach. For example, direct landfill can cause potential damage to the environment, and at the same time, these phosphorus can no longer be reused.
Our method:
We shared our idea with the manager Zhang there. He thought highly of our idea, which provided a way of thinking for the future. Due to its special chemical cycle characteristics, in the near future, phosphorus will become very precious resource. It is a very good choice to use solar energy to change the pollutants in the environment back to resources. In essence, the chemical that has been used as a resource diffuses into the water and becomes a pollutant. We use solar energy to reverse this entropy increasing, which makes the pollutant back to resources.
Not only phosphorus, but for other kinds of problems, people rarely consider the mutual transformation between pollutants and resources in terms of environmental issues. In the long run, this approach has advantages. We made a 3D model of the hardware for this purpose, and introduced the bacterial and algae symbiosis system in consideration of the engineered bacteria’s resistance problem in real applications, and made two complex synthetic biology pathways. We provided other teams with such a platform. This is a brand new idea! A brand new design compared to the existing means!
