WISEFLOW · Whole-plant Assessment of Innovative, Sustainable and Energy-efficient Future Layouts of Wastewater Treatment Plants
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-04-01 → 2021-09-14
- EU contribution
- €178,320
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Whole-plant Assessment of Innovative, Sustainable and Energy-efficient Future Layouts of Wastewater Treatment Plants
Clean water and sanitation, the outcomes of wastewater treatment, are the pillars of sustainable development and influences, to various extents, our health, work and education, among others. The Sustainable Development Goals and EU’s Water Framework Directive both recognize environmental technologies as means of implementing their targets. It is well-known that current wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) designs, which generally uses conventional technologies, suffer from a large energy consumption, space requirements and sludge production. In the near future, it is also expected that pollutant loads will increase, especially in urban areas, combined with more stringent effluent quality limits. All these challenges need to be simultaneously addressed at once. However, there is a limit to how much operational and control strategies for conventional WWTPs can do to resolve these challenges. Over the past 20 years, some distinct technological innovations have been made in the field of wastewater treatment, demonstrating that a better effluent quality and sustainability can go hand in hand, and may even be combined with reduced investment and operating costs. The integration of these novel technologies within WWTP schemes already applied in practice as well as those put forward for the future, offers promising perspectives in addressing the above-mentioned current and future WWTP challenges. The main scientific objective of the WISEFLOW project was to develop innovative wastewater treatment process layouts, comprised of conventional and novel unit processes. These new process layouts were evaluated by comparing their performance with respect to a conventional activated sludge-based WWTP. The comparison was performed using a set of evaluation criteria which takes into account effluent quality, operational costs, system compactness, energy-efficiency, resource recovery, among others.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Whole-plant assessment of Innovative, Sustainable and Energy-efficient Future Layouts Of Wastewater treatment plantsThe WISEFLOW project addresses multiple, and oftentimes conflicting, current and future challenges of wastewater treatment plants: load increases due to population growth and urbanization, stricter effluent quality limits, space-limitations for building new plants, energy-efficiency and last but not the least, sustainability.A promising perspective to address these challenges is through the integration of existing and novel technologies, in a smart and innovative way, within wastewater treatment plant configurations. These technologies include, but are not limited to: anaerobic treatment, high-rate activated sludge units, chemically enhanced primary treatment, aerobic granular sludge systems and shortcut nitrogen removal processes. Moreover, besides description of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in biochemical processes, attention will be paid to the fate of sulfur, which has deleterious effects and is often overlooked but is particularly present in coastal areas.Research in this project will focus on key process engineering aspects, i.e. design and control, as the missing link to bring sustainable schemes for municipal wastewater treatment into practice. Through model-based analysis of unit processes and integrated schemes, including model calibration and validation based on experimental full- and lab-scale data, the proposed schemes will be optimized, evaluated and compared using multi-criteria objective analysis and newly-developed evaluation criteria. The overall multi-criteria evaluation and optimization of these novel wastewater treatment plant schemes is technically challenging and inherently innovative.The developed methodology and insights gained from this project will not be only most valuable as such, but will also be transferable to additional novel treatment technologies coming up in the future.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT GENT · GentCoordinatorBelgium
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/846316
- https://www.ugent.be/en/research/research-ugent/eu-trackrecord/h2020/msca-h2020/wiseflow.htm
Data: CORDIS, © European Union