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General and Unifying Concepts for Wastewater Treatment Plant Design

污水处理厂设计的通用和统一概念

基本信息

批准号：
EP/F008473/1
负责人：
Tom Curtis
金额：
$ 96.96万
依托单位：
Newcastle University
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2008
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2008 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FF008473%2F1
关键词：
General Unifying Concepts Wastewater Treatment

项目摘要

About half the world lives in cities and the proportion is rising. Societies across the world look to engineers to provide a sustainable urban existence by cleaning or managing the quality of our soils water and air; cleaning up the pollutants we produce today and the pollution created by earlier generations. For over a century now engineers have turned to biological treatment systems to help them in this task. These systems can be used to clean domestic and industrial wastewater, contaminated groundwater, sources of smell, municipal refuse and contaminated land. The genius of engineers and the paradox of engineering is that systems can be successfully manipulated even though we don't fully understand how they work. This is particularly true for engineered biological systems where engineers must operate with only a sketchy of how even the most basic concepts of the nature abundance and activities microbes that treat the waste. Much of what we know has been learnt by empirical (trial and error) research and theoretical foundation we exploit is at best often based on science from the 1940s. The history of engineering tells us that improving the theory behind design can help revolutionise engineering practise (compare the bridges of the late 18th century with the bridges of the late 19th century). We believe that, if environmental engineers can improve the theoretical basis of design, we have similarly radical effect on the design of biological treatment systems. The study of the relationship between an organism and its environment is called ecology. We therefore believe that theoretical ecology is the science from which we can learn the most. We have therefore sought to use ecological theory to improve our ability to predict three aspects of a system: the nature of the species present, the presence (or otherwise) of chaotic dynamics, the relationship between pollutant consumption and resource manipulation by the engineer. We believe that success and failure in a biological treatment system often relates to one of these three interlinked aspects of biological treatment. Using ideas originally developed to predict the composition of tropical forests and tropical islands, we has successfully developed a model that allow us to predict the number and possible identity of bacteria in biological treatment systems. This model appears to work in a very wide variety of situations and may well be universal. We would like to formally corroborate this model, and calibrate it for a wide range of engineered systems and see if it will tell us something about the fate of endocrine disrupting compounds in wastewater. The out come of this model can be fed directly into another model that we are developing with colleagues all over Europe to predict how microscale growth of these species translates into the macroscale behaviour in nitrifying biofilms and microbial fuel cells. We have developed and tentatively employed tests of chaotic dynamics in biological treatment systems. We need to complete those tests and back them up with mathematical models of possible causes of chaos to see if we can relate the basic biology to the stability of the system. We have also developed models to relate resource availability to the probability of failure in a system. At present this can be used to determine the probability of for a given aeration rate however it could be used much more widely. The major problem is the calibration of the models. Calibration means determining the abundance of individual species. This is possible at present but slow. Faster simpler methods are needed and the search for such methods is emerging as a priority for us. What we propose is difficult and requires large amounts of data and specialist skill. We have accelerated our progress and enhance our funding by cooperating internationally and we have disseminated our skill through workshops. We will continue to both cooperate and train as we work towards our goal.

世界上大约有一半的人居住在城市，而且这一比例正在上升。世界各地的社会都希望工程师能够通过清洁或管理土壤、水和空气的质量来提供可持续的城市生存；清理我们今天产生的污染物以及前几代人造成的污染。一个多世纪以来，工程师们一直求助于生物处理系统来帮助他们完成这项任务。这些系统可用于清洁生活和工业废水、受污染的地下水、气味源、城市垃圾和受污染的土地。工程师的天才和工程学的悖论在于，即使我们不完全理解系统是如何工作的，我们也可以成功地操纵系统。对于工程生物系统来说尤其如此，工程师必须仅了解处理废物的自然丰度和微生物活动的最基本概念。我们所知道的大部分知识都是通过经验（反复试验）研究获得的，而我们利用的理论基础充其量通常是基于 20 世纪 40 年代的科学。工程史告诉我们，改进设计背后的理论有助于彻底改变工程实践（将 18 世纪末的桥梁与 19 世纪末的桥梁进行比较）。我们相信，如果环境工程师能够改进设计的理论基础，我们对生物处理系统的设计也会产生类似的根本性影响。研究有机体与其环境之间关系的学科称为生态学。因此，我们相信理论生态学是我们最能学到东西的科学。因此，我们试图利用生态理论来提高我们预测系统三个方面的能力：存在物种的性质、混沌动力学的存在（或其他）、污染物消耗与工程师资源操纵之间的关系。我们相信，生物处理系统的成功和失败通常与生物处理的这三个相互关联的方面之一有关。利用最初用于预测热带森林和热带岛屿组成的想法，我们成功开发了一个模型，使我们能够预测生物处理系统中细菌的数量和可能的身份。该模型似乎适用于各种情况，并且很可能是通用的。我们想正式证实这个模型，并针对各种工程系统对其进行校准，看看它是否能告诉我们一些有关废水中内分泌干扰化合物的命运的信息。该模型的结果可以直接输入到我们与欧洲各地同事开发的另一个模型中，以预测这些物种的微观生长如何转化为硝化生物膜和微生物燃料电池的宏观行为。我们已经开发并初步采用了生物处理系统中的混沌动力学测试。我们需要完成这些测试，并用造成混乱的可能原因的数学模型来支持它们，看看我们是否可以将基本生物学与系统的稳定性联系起来。我们还开发了将资源可用性与系统故障概率联系起来的模型。目前，这可用于确定给定通气率的概率，但它的用途可以更广泛。主要问题是模型的校准。校准意味着确定单个物种的丰度。目前这是可能的，但速度很慢。我们需要更快、更简单的方法，并且寻找此类方法正在成为我们的首要任务。我们提出的建议很困难，需要大量数据和专业技能。我们通过国际合作加快了进展并增加了资金，并通过研讨会传播了我们的技能。我们将继续合作和培训，努力实现我们的目标。