Future Water Services

在全球和加拿大，市政和工业废水处理厂几十年来一直围绕着强调减少有机碳、悬浮固体、营养物质(氮和磷)和病原体的传统设计概念而发展。因此，这些管道末端工艺只会减少经处理的废水排放到接收水的环境后果，而且是能源密集型的，操作和维护成本很高。杨柳博士的研究致力于发展更经济、更健康、更环保的未来水服务，使生态系统能够恢复并支持循环经济。这一创新的一个基本特征来自于将废水作为一种资源来处理，因为回收的能量、营养物质以及用于重复利用的水具有相当大的价值，还可以对气候和人口变化提供更强的适应能力。通过更好地了解微生物如何适应其工程环境，并在微生物群落代谢特征和弹性之间建立可控的联系，存在着显著提高废水资源回收效率的关键机会。刘的研究团队正在努力抓住这些机会，重点解决与现有基于资源回收的废水处理技术的效率和可扩展性相关的问题，通过在理解生物处理微生物如何适应强大的高性能方面的量子步骤改变。该计划将采用新的组学和机器学习工具，将功能微生物群与工程参数联系起来，并从新的改源黑水和灰水系统以及常规污水收集的城市污水中开发基于资源回收的处理。刘博士的研究成果将包括改善生物反应器的设计和运营，以减少总体足迹，增强过程的弹性，以及更好地整合知识，最终改善运营和控制，这将解决当前资源回收过程的经济限制，并努力在集中式和分散式社区系统中实现净零目标。预计加拿大社区将在减少碳排放、提高资源回收效率和过程稳定性、降低关键控制点的微生物风险以及为子孙后代保护水源水质方面取得重大进展。

Globally and in Canada, municipal and industrial wastewater treatment plants have evolved over decades around conventional design concepts, which emphasize the reduction of organic carbon, suspended solids, nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) and pathogens. As a result, these end of pipe processes only reduce environmental consequences of treated wastewater discharges to receiving waters, and are energy intensive and costly to operate and maintain. Dr. Yang Liu's research strives to develop future water services that are more economic, health-protective, and environmentally friendly, allowing ecosystems to restore and supporting the circular economy.A fundamental feature of this innovation comes from treating wastewater as a resource, as there is considerable value in recovered energy, nutrients as well as water for reuse that also provides greater resilience to climate and demographic changes. Key opportunities exist to dramatically improve wastewater resource recovery efficiency through improved understanding of how microbiomes adapt to their engineered environments and developing controllable links between microbial community metabolic profiles and resilience.Dr. Liu's research team is working to address these opportunities, focusing on addressing issues associated with the efficiency and scalability of existing resource-recovery based wastewater treatment technologies through a quantum step change in understanding how biological treatment microbiomes can be adapted for robust high performance. This program will adopt novel omics and machine learning tools, link functional microbial groups with engineering parameters, and develop resource-recovery based treatment from novel source-diverted blackwater and greywater systems, as well as municipal wastewater collected in conventional sewers.Key outcomes from Dr. Liu's research will include improving bioreactor design and operation to reduce overall footprint, enhancing process resilience, and better integrating knowledge to ultimately improve operations and controls, which will address current economic limitations for resource-recovery processes and strive for net-zero goals within both centralized and decentralized community systems. Significant advances for Canadian communities are expected by reducing carbon emissions, improving resource recovery efficiency and process stability, reducing microbial risks at critical control points, and protecting source water quality for future generations.