Municipal wastewater treatment technology innovation

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The challenges facing the water and wastewater industry b include aging infrastructure, land constraints, energy demands, and financial limitations. Furthermore, there is a strong paradigm shift towards resource and energy recovery from wastewater contaminants. The aforementioned challenges could only be overcome by developing intensified treatment processes - processes that achieve the desired treatment objectives (e.g., removal of suspended solids, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, etc.) in reduced time and/or space and/or with less energy requirement. Thus, the focus of this research is on the future of municipal wastewater treatment where energy consumption is reduced and energy and other resources (water and nutrients) are recovered. Often technologies are developed and tested alone, without integration in process trains and accordingly, neither do the testing conditions reflect the dynamics of municipal wastewater in terms of composition, constituent loadings, and flows, nor are the impacts of the process on downstream processes and others fully assessed. Thus one of the main objectives of this project is to design a pilot scale state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant to be situated at the Greenway Research Facility located in London, ON that is flexible enough to readily accommodate process modifications, instrumentation, and control, as well as a broad range of biological, physiochemical, and thermal technologies for both wastewater and biosolids treatment. This designed facility will be one of a kind for this region, enabling university researchers and giving them access to a test bed in a real-world environment and enabling industry researchers to evaluate their new technologies in a plant-wide setting.While technology evaluation in a plant-wide setting is not always feasible due to various socio-economic constraints, modelling and simulation is a viable tool for evaluation of emerging technologies. The commercially available modeling software do not incorporate fluid dynamics in modeling biological and physio-chemical treatment processes. This research project will incorporate fluid dynamics in plant-wide models for the pilot plant.