Model-based optimization of water resource recovery facilities

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An important change is happening to the wastewater industry: a paradigm shift is occurring from an industry that treats wastewater to an industry that brings a more positive message: it produces clean water, and recovers fertilizers and energy contained in ‘used’ water. The fact that WRRFs aim at delivering valued products that can partially replace those produced by other means (typically in the chemical industry) leads to a big change in specifications of the outputs of the facility: no longer treated wastewater and biosolids, but products that have to compete with what is already on the market. These tighter specifications will impose a challenge on the process control systems that will be required to guarantee the quality of the products of the WRRFs. Given the difficulties in collecting high quality data on which the control systems rely to act upon the system (recent practical studies using partially automated data validation report data losses of 5 to 60%), important research efforts have to be deployed to create the process monitoring and control systems that maintain these tight product specifications at all time.