Wastewater Treatment Plants Can be Built for Small-scale Applications
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network in Case Studies
Innovative Treatment Products redesigns its process control system to handle a wide range of treatment throughput.
By Gary H. Lucas,
Innovative Treatment Products
Single skid ready to run
By starting with a clean slate and avoiding the pitfalls of simply making smaller versions of large plants, new pre-packaged plants using membrane bio-reactor (MBR) technology can operate continuously at 5% of rated capacity, while still delivering high discharge quality in compliance with the highest state and municipal regulations. Source: Innovative Treatment Products, Via: Control Design
For most people, treatment of wastewater from homes and businesses is one of those it-just-happens things taken care of by local governments. But any facility too isolated to connect to a larger sewer system—such as a school, office or retailer—will have to supply its own treatment for obvious practical reasons and to avoid a variety of fines from environmental agencies.
These isolated locations often have too much water to treat using a septic tank, so they must provide their own wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), usually a miniature version of city-scale counterparts. The main operational problem these small-scale WWTPs face is flow variability. A small-scale WWTP is designed for an anticipated flow rate to cover the maximum the supported facility expects to generate but can struggle to operate properly when the flow is toward the low end of the range. This can be mitigated somewhat by adding storage tanks, but a better solution is to change the process to make it more inherently scalable.
This task of redesigning the process has been the objective of Innovative Treatment Products (ITP) in Owing Mills, Maryland, from its inception. By starting with a clean slate and avoiding the pitfalls of simply making smaller versions of large plants, new pre-packaged plants using membrane-bioreactor technology can operate continuously at 5% of rated capacity, while still delivering high discharge quality in compliance with the highest state and municipal regulations
Read full article: Control Design
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Taxonomy
- Bioreactor
- Reclaimed Wastewater
- Membrane Bioreactor Systems
- Technology
- Wastewater Treatment
- Sequence Analysis
- Bioreactors & Processes
- Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR)