KINETICS OF THE BIODEGRADATION OF MONOAROMATICS BY Pseudomonas aeruginosa

ABSTRACT Water contamination by monoaromatic compounds has risen throughout time, which leads to the necessity of developing new water treatment technology, capable of minimizing their negative effect on the environment. In this context, biological processes present themselves as a solution to the processes of extraction. Bioremediation makes use of microbial groups capable of using hydrocarbons as a source of carbon to perform their metabolic functions. This work evaluated the biodegradation efficiency of Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain isolated from contaminated matrices, for the substrates benzene, ethylbenzene and toluene, aiming to determine to which compound the bacteria had better adaptation. For that, bioremediation assays were performed for each of the monoaromatic compounds, in an isolated way, with the goal of obtaining experimental data and from this Monod and Andrews kinetic models were discretized and numerically developed through the Runge-Kutta method. It was possible to observe that Pseudomonas aeruginosa has a bigger affinity for ethylbenzene, while benzene generated a bigger microbian coefficient. Monod´s model was capable of predicting satisfactorily the experimental data.