Research project - Treatrec
TreatRec - Interdisciplinary concepts for municipal wastewater treatment and resource recovery. Tackling future challenges (Grant agreement no: 642904)
The utilities of the wastewater sector have to prepare to face a multitude of future challenges such as the recovery of resource, the removal of emerging contaminants and a higher sustainability in process operation.
The goals of the project
- To evaluate technological feasibility and cost-effectiveness of several advanced treatments focusing on nutrient recovery and removal of emerging contaminants.
- To improve scientific understanding of the fate and behaviour of understudied emerging micro contaminants during wastewater treatment.
- To identify the role of each treatment unit within a WWTP related to the micro contaminants removal, nitrogen and phosphorous recovery or removal with energy consumption, reliability and performance levels.
- To encapsulate process knowledge acquired in the project in the form of a decision support system that will allow decision makers to make more qualified decisions.
The project will be performed by 5 PhD students. Four of them will spend part of their time at Aquafin to work on the following assignments: Pilot works of three different advanced processes for pharmaceuticals removal in effluents: Ozonation, Biological Granular Activated Carbon (the patented 'BioMAC'), and bio-augmented sludge with the Phoma fungi. Pilot works on struvite recovery, Sharon and Anammox Integration of the multiple facets (technical, economic, environmental, etc ) of the available technological solutions into a Decision Support System.
The project runs from January 2015 to December 2018