Wastewater

On-site wastewater treatment plants (OSTs) often lack monitoring, resulting in unreliable treatment performance. They thus appear to be a stopgap solution despite their potential contribution to circular water management. Low-maintenance but inaccurate soft sensors are emerging that address this concern. However, how their inaccuracy impacts the catchment-wide treatment performance of a system of many OSTs has not been quantified. We develop a stochastic model to estimate catchment-wide OST performances with a Monte Carlo simulation. In our study, soft sensors with a 70% accuracy improved the treatment performance from 66% of the time functional to 98%. Soft sensors optimized for specificity, indicating the true negative rate, improve the system performance, while sensors optimized for sensitivity, indicating the true positive rate, quantify the treatment performance more accurately. This new insight leads us to suggest programming two soft sensors in practical settings with the same hardware sensor data as input: one soft sensor geared to high specificity for maintenance scheduling and one geared to high sensitivity for performance quantification. Our findings suggest that a maintenance strategy combining inaccurate sensors with appropriate alarm management can vastly improve the mean catchment-wide treatment performance of a system of OSTs.

Acid-tolerant ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) can open the door to new applications, such as partial nitritation at low pH. However, they can also be problematic because chemical nitrite oxidation occurs at low pH, leading to the release of harmful nitrogen oxide gases. In this publication, the role of acid-tolerant AOB in urine treatment was explored. On the one hand, the technical feasibility of ammonia oxidation under acidic conditions for source-separated urine with total nitrogen concentrations up to 3.5 g-N L^-1 was investigated. On the other hand, the abundance and growth of acid-tolerant AOB at more neutral pH was explored. Under acidic conditions (pH of 5), ammonia oxidation rates of 500 mg-N L^-1 d^-1 and 10 g-N g-VSS^-1 d^-1 were observed, despite high concentrations of 15 mg-N L^-1 of the AOB-inhibiting compound nitrous acid and low concentration of 0.04 mg-N L^-1 of the substrate ammonia. However, ammonia oxidation under acidic conditions was very sensitive to process disturbances. Even short periods of less than 12 h without oxygen or without influent resulted in a complete cessation of ammonia oxidation with a recovery time of up to two months, which is a problem for low maintenance applications such as decentralized treatment. Furthermore, undesirable nitrogen losses of about 10% were observed. Under acidic conditions, a novel AOB strain was enriched with a relative abundance of up to 80%, for which the name “Candidatus (Ca.) Nitrosacidococcus urinae” is proposed. While Nitrosacidococcus members were present only to a small extent (0.004%) in urine nitrification reactors operated at pH values between 5.8 and 7, acid-tolerant AOB were always enriched during long periods without influent, resulting in an uncontrolled drop in pH to as low as 2.5. Long-term experiments at different pH values showed that the activity of “Ca. Nitrosacidococcus urinae” decreased strongly at a pH of 7, where they were also outcompeted by the acid-sensitive AOB Nitrosomonas halophila. The experiment results showed that the decreased activity of “Ca. Nitrosacidococcus urinae” correlated with the limited availability of dissolved iron at neutral pH.

Microplastic particles (MP) are efficiently retained in wastewater treatment plants and enriched in sewage sludge. For monitoring MP contents in wastewater systems, sewage sludge is thus well suited, but also requires an isolation of MP from the sludge matrix, as other sewage sludge components may interfere with the MP identification and quantification. Although organic matter in sludge samples can be removed through acid and enzymatic digestion procedures, cellulose - mainly from toilet paper - remains in the digests, due to its high chemical resistivity and similar density to MP. We apply the separation concept of magnetic seeded filtration to isolate MP through selective hetero-agglomeration with magnetic seed particles. MP and cellulose differ in their hydrophobic properties and we investigate to what extent these differences can be exploited to selectively form MP-magnetite hetero-agglomerates in the presence of cellulose. These hetero-agglomerates are subsequently separated using a magnet. Five MP types (Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polypropylene (PP), low density polyethylene (LDPE), polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polystyrene (PS)) and cellulose particles were mixed in different combinations with both hydrophilic and hydrophobic (silanized) magnetite particles. PET, PP, LDPE and PS only poorly agglomerated with pristine (hydrophilic) magnetite, but efficiently formed hetero-agglomerates with hydrophobic magnetite and were successfully removed from suspensions (80 - 100 %). PVC agglomerated more efficiently with pristine than with hydrophobic magnetite and cellulose only agglomerated to a limited extent with either hydrophilic or hydrophobic magnetite, resulting in a high process selectivity. Results from experiments conducted at different ionic strengths and with hydrophilic and hydrophobic magnetite suggests that the agglomeration process was dominated by hydrophobic interactions. Enzymatic and oxidative treatment of the MP only marginally affected the separation efficiencies and (treated) MP spiked to sewage sludge extracts were successfully recovered using magnetic seeded filtration.