The IntensiCarb Digester: An Innovative Anaerobic Digestion Technology for Process Intensification and Resource Recovery from Municipal Wastewater Biosolids

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The challenges facing the water and wastewater industry 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 in reduced time and/or space and/or with less energy requirement. Wastewater treatment generates biosolids, the processing of which through thickening, stabilization, and dewatering accounts for over 50% of the total treatment costs. One of the most widely used biosolids stabilization is anaerobic digestion, which is operated at 37oC and atmospheric pressure generates methane energy and liquid streams that are rich in volatile fatty acids (that are beneficial for enhanced biological nitrogen and phosphorous removal from municipal wastewaters), and ammonia which can be used for fertilizers. This project aims to develop a disruptive anaerobic digestion technology, the IntensiCarb Digester (ID) that not only integrates the three aforementioned biosolids processes in one but also facilitates separate recovery of bioenergy, VFA, and ammonia. The operational conditions of the ID such as the vacuum pressure, duration, application mode (continuous/intermittent), hydraulic and solids retention times (HRT, SRT) will be optimized for resource recovery from various wastewater biosolids i.e. primary and thickened waste activated sludge. The study will also develop both a biological process model for the ID and a hydrodynamic model to enable scale-up of the optimized technology and minimize its energy consumption. The conceptual process design for a full-scale system at the municipal partner facilities will be completed and a comprehensive economic study will be conducted. The economic study will benchmark the ID against commercial current state-of-the-art technologies, identify market niches with respect to both new greenfield applications and retrofits, and potential end users for full-scale implementation.