Whole-Plant assessment of innovative, sustainable and energy-efficient future layouts of wastewater treatment plants
Whole-plant assessment of Innovative, Sustainable and Energy-efficient Future Layouts Of Wastewater treatment plants

The 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.