Grant: Alliance Grants

Aging infrastructure, land constraints, energy demands, and financial limitations are challenging the wastewater industry, necessitating a strong paradigm shift towards resource and energy recovery to enhance sustainability. Intensification processes - processes that achieve the desired treatment objectives in reduced time and/or space and/or with less energy requirement can alleviate many of the industry challenges. Wastewater treatment generates biosolids, the processing of which through thickening, stabilization, and dewatering accounts for over 50% of the total treatment costs. One of the most widely used biosolids stabilization is mesophilic anaerobic digestion, which is operated at 37oC and atmospheric pressure generates methane energy and liquid streams that are rich in volatile fatty acids (that are beneficial for enhanced biological nitrogen and phosphorous removal from municipal wastewaters), ammonia, and phosphorous which can be used for fertilizers among other value added products. This project aims to further advance a disruptive anaerobic digestion technology, the IntensiCarb Digester (ID), which integrates conventional digestion with vacuum evaporation, that has recently been demonstrated to facilitate the processing of 4 times the typical organic loading rates that a conventional digester can sustain with the same performance and the added benefit of ammonia recovery. This project not only advances the integration of the vacuum with other intensification processes such as thermophilic and hyper-thermophilic anaerobic digestion, optimizes separate recovery of ammonia, volatile fatty acids, and phosphorous using physicochemical processes and membranes, but also facilitates scaleup by deriving the design basis for a skid-mounted pilot unit to be deployed in facilities in Canada and the US. The study will also expand the application of the technology to feedstocks with high nitrogen content. The techno-economic analysis will benchmark the ID against commercial current state-of-the-art technologies, identify market niches with respect to both new greenfield applications and retrofits, and potential end users for full-scale implementation.