Xiangyu Ji

Research interest

Climate change causes urban weather extremes with hotter and drier summers and more storm water events. Blue-green infrastructures (BGIs), like green roofs and tree trenches, offer solutions for rainwater retention and an as yet underutilized potential to clean urban water from contaminants. As part of the UFZ PhD College CLEANER, we aim at creating a biofilm-based, biochar-enhanced reactive urban percolation system for improved treatment of urban run-off in tree trenches. We hypothesize that the physicochemical properties of biochar allow to control reversible sorptive enrichment and biodegradation of (model) runoff pollutants in biochar-augmented tree trenches. Therefore, we ask the following questions:

• Which sorbent properties enable contaminant retention in high load periods (e.g. heavy rain), while providing availability for biodegradation in weak load periods?
• What facilitates microbial uptake and degradation of particle-bound contaminants in sorbent-augmented reactive percolation systems?
• Which sorbent-augmented, biofilm-based percolation system enables fast retention of (different) pollutants in high load periods, while providing high buffer capacity and availability for long-term biodegradation?

CV / Scientific Career

Publications

Moerland, M. J., Van Gijn, K., Ji, X., Buisman, C. J., Rijnaarts, H. H., Langenhoff, A. A., & Van Eekert, M. H. (2022).
Micropollutants removal during high rate thermophilic and hyper-thermophilic anaerobic digestion of concentrated black water
Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering, 10(2), 107340.