Abstract
The presence of micropollutants in the environment has triggered research on quantifying and predicting their fate in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Since the removal of micropollutants is highly related to conventional pollutant removal and affected by hydraulics, aeration, biomass composition and solids concentration, the fate of these conventional pollutants and characteristics must be well predicted before tackling models to predict the fate of micropollutants. In light of this, the current paper presents the dynamic modelling of conventional pollutants undergoing activated sludge treatment using a limited set of additional daily composite data besides the routine data collected at a WWTP over one year. Results showed that as a basis for modelling, the removal of micropollutants, the Bürger–Diehl settler model was found to capture the actual effluent total suspended solids (TSS) concentrations more efficiently than the Takács model by explicitly modelling the overflow boundary. Results also demonstrated that particular attention must be given to characterizing incoming TSS to obtain a representative solids balance in the presence of a chemically enhanced primary treatment, which is key to predict the fate of micropollutants.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the staff at the Guelph WWTP for their help in providing the data. We gratefully acknowledge the McGill Engineering Doctoral Award for supporting Zeina Baalbaki. Funding for this study was provided by a research Grant to Viviane Yargeau (PI) and colleagues (Chris Metcalfe and Peter Vanrolleghem) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada through the Strategic Grants Program (430646-2012). Peter Vanrolleghem holds the Canada Research Chair on Water Quality Modelling.
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Baalbaki, Z., Torfs, E., Maere, T. et al. Dynamic modelling of solids in a full-scale activated sludge plant preceded by CEPT as a preliminary step for micropollutant removal modelling. Bioprocess Biosyst Eng 40, 499–510 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00449-016-1715-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00449-016-1715-5