Aerobic granular sludge in continuous flow reactor configuration

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Canada's wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) are mandated by federal and provincial regulations to upgrade to full removal of organics and fertilizing nutrients which lead to deterioration of rivers and lakes. Existing WWTP use long, continuous flow reactors (CFR). A traditional upgrade of such plants would require significant increase of land (often hardly available on site) and capital costs as well as carry large operating costs, which could be overwhelming for a municipality. A new and highly effective technology of aerobic granular sludge (AGS) recently demonstrated outside Canada, has potential to offset these problems by requiring less land and carrying much lower operating costs. The AGS technology is however offered only as a sequencing batch reactor technology or AGS-SBR, which is a discontinuous process and is ill-suited to retrofit/upgrade the CFR process present in some 90% of Canadian municipal plants. It is proposed to develop a ground-breaking aerobic granular sludge continuous flow reactor or AGS-CFR, in a configuration that would feature key elements of granular sludge in an existing continuous flow system. A large pilot scale system fed with raw wastewater at an existing wastewater treatment plant will be used to develop design criteria, control, monitoring and operational parameters which will facilitate scale-up to full scale. The elements of this breakthrough new AGS CFR process have already been demonstrated by the Applicants in small scale. The project is of strategic importance to Canadian municipalities as application of AGS-CFR will allow for implementation of full nutrient removal by fitting the process into existing infrastructure and actually lowering the operating costs. The industrial partner AECOM has an immediate interest in adopting the technology in its design work around the world. The City of Winnipeg utility partner is vitally interested as it has been faced with prohibitive costs and size of anticipated conventional upgrade of its main plant and therefore views the AGS-CFR technology as the alternative solution to arrive at more affordable capital and operating costs.