E-Klär

(Kopie 3)

The Funding Measure ERWAS of the  Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany, the BMBF, intends to promote the exploration of new possibilities  for optimising water management facilities with regard to their energy balance and the associated use of resources. Furthermore, it presents an incentive to examine how water management facilities can be intelligently integrated into the water and energy infrastructure of the future.

The municipal „waste water treatment plant (wttp) of the future" will not only cater to today’s requirements for nutrient removal. In many cases, further processing steps regarding the elimination of micropollutants and/or pathogens will be included. At the same time the wwtp of the future will recover the energy contained in the wastewater as well as material resources as far as possible. Therefore it is necessary to critically analyse best practices and use new technologies. Besides effluent quality requirements, other requirements and claims increasingly affect everyday plant operation and make the use of new technologies attractive.

The joint research project E-Klär develops strategies in order to use energy and other resources present in wastewater most efficiently and to reduce energy consumption of next generation wastewater treatment plants. A methodology will be developed that will help to transform existing plants into energy-optimised, resource-protecting and economically feasible plants through a plant specific step-by-step process. The strategies to be developed focus on an extensive nutrient removal alongside with a reduction of micropollutants and pathogens.

The project will result in innovative process chains using new methods which are conceived and tested in their interactions with each other and with best practices processes. In addition, innovative approaches to integrated material and energy flow modeling will be developed for the whole wastewater treatment plant, so that after calibration on representative facilities it is possible to compare various wastewater treatment plant concepts in terms of energy, resources and costs. Based on this, practical recommendations for the transformation of current wastewater treatment plants in more energy-efficient future concepts are developed in an interdisciplinary transferable methodology.

The project includes three key activities: Design, Operation and Transformation. Within the key activity "Design", innovative processes and their interdependencies among each other as well as with established technologies are investigated. The Work Package 1.4 Carbon Utilization of the Institute of Sanitary and Environmental Engineering at the Technical University Braunschweig lies within this key activity. The focus of this research work will be on increasing energy production during the sludge treatment process by using carbon as an energy source. Such an increased energy production can be achieved for example by a thermal hydrolysis pre-treatment of the sludge to be digested using the Cambi process. Another option to increase energy production which will be investigated is the addition of washing waters from the treatment of wastewater plant screeenings for co-fermentation. Also a minimum-energy-consumption screw press produced by Huber SE will be tested for dewatering of the digested sludge. All test faciliities will be installed in modified freight containers and can thus be operated at various wastewater treatment plants of the  Ruhrverband and in Braunschweig. The results obtained during the research tests will be included in the development of an enhanced plant-wide modelling approach of the entire wwtp.