Treatment of Municipal, Industrial and Hospital Wastewater

Section 1. Project summary/abstract
Increasing demands on treatment of municipal, industrial and hospital wastewater, and the increasing urbanisation leading to water deficiency have all put conventional wastewater treatment technologies under pressure. High concentrations of organic matter influence the receiving water as well. These factors encourage further development of new treatment technologies like membrane bioreactors (MBR) which produce high quality effluent compared to conventional treatment plants. Since MBR is a relatively new method for wastewater treatment, there are still some drawbacks for it to be economical competitive with CAS treatment plants. The major drawback it the big energy consumption needed to avoid fouling of the membranes. Therefore the overall objective is to minimize the energy consumption ofMBR's. The rheology ofthe activated sludge plays a big role for the hydrodynamics and thereby general performance in MBR systems and will there for play a major role in this project. Experimental measurements and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models will be extended with a non-Newtonian rheological model, as this form the key to understanding the MBR operation with respect to fouling and cost-effectiveness. One of the most methods for antifouling is be air sparging which results in shear stress on the surface of membrane. Flows with air bubbles in AS (activated sludge) are very complex. Due to this a large amount of physical experiments will be carried out for validation ofthe CFD models describing the flow.

The budget for the project is 715680 DKK in total