Overview
The Biofuels Research and Development sub-team is investigating the formation of struvite, a slow release fertilizer, from acid-whey waste streams. Struvite formation requires nitrogen and phosphorus, so recovering struvite can reduce the nitrogen and phosphorus of waste-streams. Additionally, compared to other fertilizers, there is less potential for nutrient runoff or overfertilization due to its slow-release nature. In collaboration with the Tester research group in CBE, the Biofuels Research & Development sub-team created model solutions in the lab to represent anaerobic digestate from acid-whey waste streams, and performed struvite precipitation reactions. The team analyzed results using the equilibrium modeling software Visual MINTEQ and contributed to a research paper on this work. The paper was recently published at this link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.iecr.2c01077.
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