Effects of micronutrient niacin on treatment efficiency of textile wastewater

Textile wastewater is well known as one of the wastewaters to be most difficultly treated. The effects of niacin on textile wastewater treatment efficiency were studied by continuous addition of 1.0 mg·L⁻¹ niacin, the physical and chemical indexes of the water samples, such as COD, ammonia and dehydrogenase activities, were analyzed every day with standard methods, and obvious improvement in wastewater treatment performance was achieved. The exact results showed that: ① Niacin could improve the COD removal efficiency significantly with removal rates being 1.31 times as to those of the control system; ② under this experimental condition, addition of niacin had almost no effect on the removal of ammonia; ③ Addition of niacin could improve the activity of dehydrogenase by 130%. It proved that the biological treatment performance of textile wastewater treatment system probably could be optimized through micronutrient niacin supplement. Foundation item: Supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) (2002AA601150) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2003034137). Biography: LIANG Wei (1971-), Ph. D., Associate professor, research direction: environmental microbiology and environmental engineering.