Study to Improve Oman's Treatment Plants

The local research study was conducted by Dr. Salam Kadhim Al Dawery from the College of Engineering and Architecture at Nizwa University and funded by The Research Council titled 'The impact of sludge rheology on design and operation of wastewater treatment plant'

Dr Al Dawery, the principal investigator of the project said that wastewater treatment and water reuse processes have become a necessity in many countries in the world, including the Sultanate of Oman and the countries that suffer from water scarcity. The increasing volumes of wastewater produced and stricter regulations that are frequently put into practice cause a continuous increase of volumes of the waste activated sludge generated from wastewater treatment plants making it vital to search for alternative methods that can improve the performance of the wastewater treatment plants to produce more treated water.

Thus, the main aim of this proposed research was to study the conditioning process and the rheology of the activated sludge. The results of this study provided vital information to improve the wastewater treatment process starting from the sludge production and conditioning to disposal operations in wastewater treatment plants with acceptable specifications that can be benefitted from in public areas such as agriculture, industry, construction, and other fields.

Dr Al Dawery added that the study uses long carbon chain polymers called polyelectrolyte, that speeds the settling and agglomeration and then the deposition of muds and suspended solids in wastewater, as well as studying the properties of the clustered muds by the rheology device. The relationship between fluid dynamics and the polymer/sludge interaction has been shown to be critical in the mixing and conditioning performance.
The research also studied some of the variables in the experiment, such as turbidity, degree of acidity, conductivity, ionic charge of the samples and others.

Source: Times of Oman

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• Treatment
• Sludge Separation
• Sludge Treatment
• Research