Resource recovery from wastewater and sludge: Modelling and control challenges

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) have been renamed water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs). Our industry is quickly moving from an end-of-pipe environmental protection service to an economic producer of valued products for society. Based on a critical review of resource recovery technologies that are currently applied or in advanced development, it became obvious that most of these technologies are based on physicochemical unit processes (precipitation, volatilization, sorption, ...). Current industrial practice for the design and operation of WRRFs is based on mathematical models describing the traditional biological processes. The modeling challenge therefore is to provide practice with proper models for the physicochemical resource recovery processes. The fact that the WRRFs aim at delivering valued products that can partially replace those produced by other means (typically in the chemical industry) leads to a paradigm shift in specifications of the outputs of the facility: no longer treated wastewater and biosolids, but products that have to compete with what is already on the market. The tighter specifications will thus impose a challenge on the process control systems that will be required to guarantee the quality of the products of the WRRFs.