Modular Treatment Approach for Drinking Water and Wastewater

By Satinder Kaur Brar

Modular Treatment Approach for Drinking Water and Wastewater is a comprehensive resource that explores the latest studies and techniques in the field of treating water. It offers a new approach to tackling the demand for a high-quality, economic and green water treatment system and providing clean water globally. This book focuses on a modular strategy, which allows for a customized retrofit solution to the constantly changing parameters that are dependent on current demand and requirements. It summarizes the principles of modular design, as well as current developments and perspectives. Beginning with an introduction to sustainable and integrated water management, the book then delves into topics such as the use of modular systems for the removal of organic micropollutants; adsorbent-based reactors for modular wastewater treatment; filtration systems in modular drinking water treatment systems; and the use of solar energy in modular drinking water treatment. The book closes with a chapter on life cycle assessment for drinking water supply and treatment systems.

Modular Treatment Approach for Drinking Water and Wastewater provides a detailed overview of wastewater and drinking water treatment and is a must-have for researchers, students and professors working in these areas.

• Presents the whole lifecycle of a modular treatment approach
• Includes global case studies, detailing the methods needed and the results possible for these treatment approaches
• Provides flow charts and diagrams, giving the reader a step-by-step guide to implementing these techniques in their work
• Explores futuristic approaches and changes in the wastewater treatment

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Aug 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9780323854221

Book preview

Preface

Early wastewater treatment plants during the Roman period were primary conduits carrying dirty water, which changed in the late 19th and early 20th century with the construction of centralized sewage treatment. As environmental quality became a key preoccupation in the mid-20th century, the treatment systems became more complex and larger in size. With the passage of time, the technological, climatic, and demographic changes started affecting the performance of centralized urban water and wastewater treatment plants. Hence, a higher water quality and demand management necessitate the requirement of a novel approach for water treatment plant design. The modular systems came to the rescue as they allow a flexible, sustainable, and cost-effective water treatment service and operation. Such modular or decentralized water treatment system provides portability features, such as low footprint, and is amazingly effective for the development of the infrastructure that requires less engineering by adapting to the existing space.

The purpose of this book is to present the modern approach of tackling the problem of high-quality water and wastewater treatment demand. The modular strategy allows the customized retrofit solution to constantly changing parameters of the urban water that is to be treated. The advanced treatment modules can be added or removed, depending on the current demand and requirements. The application of modular water/wastewater treatment can be remarkably successful for nontransient, noncommunity water systems, housing developments, day care centers, schools, industries and parks, manufacturing facilities, as well as environmental remediation. Hence, this book is intended to keep the global research community, practitioners, industrialists, and young water professionals up to date with the current trend in this emerging field of modular water and wastewater treatment systems.

This book summarizes the principles of modular design (Chapters 1–4), as well as the current developments and perspectives regarding the usage of the modular approach in a cold climate (Chapter 5). It introduces the modular approach in urban water treatment. The novel and up-to-date review of wastewater (Chapter 6–12) and drinking water (Chapter 13–19) treatment methods with incorporated modular strategy is presented. The life cycle assessments of water treatment plants as well as the perspectives of modular treatment usage are explained.

We gratefully appreciate the hard work and patience of all contributing authors of this book. The views or opinions expressed in each chapter of this book are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as opinions of their affiliated organizations.

The Editors

Chapter 1: Introduction

Rahul Saini, Carlos Saul Osorio-Gonzalez, and Satinder Kaur Brar     Department of Civil Engineering, Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

Abstract

Over the past years, researchers have focused on developing technological solutions for resource recovery, water reuse, and wastewater treatment. The drivers of these research are freshwater scarcity, high energy demand, low resource recovery, and large environmental footprint. However, few technologies have resulted in sustainable water management and accepting wastewater as a resource mine. The current chapter aims to provide the information on urban water management, their issues, standards of waterways, and sustainable wastewater treatment. In addition, several issues related to wastewater treatment has also been discussed such as energy requirement, scope of nutrient recovery, and water quality monitoring.

Keywords

International water convention; Modular treatment; Resource recovery; Sustainable water management; Wastewater treatment

1.1. Introduction

The water sector around the world has faced many challenges regarding its management. However, a specific emphasis has been observed in urban water systems including drinking and wastewater systems. Water is one of the essential elements for sustaining quality of city life, livelihoods, and urban economy. In general, water management involves meeting regulatory criteria for safe drinking water, storage, treatment, wastewater discharge, drainage, and collection of stormwater to decrease risks of urban flooding. The current policies to water management have well served in terms of public safety, economic development, and public health (Melián, 2020). However, increasing impact of climate change, urbanization, strained ecosystems, and high energy requirements on water quantity and quality are becoming apparent and more visible. Fig. 1.1 shows the benefits of sustainable and integrated water management. Basically, the concept of sustainable water management includes the environmental, hydrological, ecological, and social integrity of water systems in the present and long-term future. However, because of the sustainable water management works with the above factors, it is necessary to include multidisciplinary objectives, process, and participatory agents with the aim to manage, develop, and improve the water systems (Haasnoot et al., 2011). In this sense, the sustainable water management considers the drinking and tap water as a fundamental for the human well-being, while promoting the healthy communities by creating the resilient environment.

Over the past decade, resource recovery technologies from wastewater have been extensively studied as a potential alternative, used mainly to help in resolving the problem of water scarcity. However, the current problem of this type of technologies is that a large-scale implementation is still lacking. However, to talk about water management can be a hard topic because of the wide application of water and its differences in specific application. Additionally, well-being of humanity depends on the availability of drinking water, which directly related to the food production and wastewater treatment (EL-Nwsany et al., 2019). Drinking water supplies as well as stormwater disposal systems have been a massive challenge in all the places highly populated (≥10 millions). The main concerns surrounding this situation are the fast urbanization, which has largely surpassed most of the used systems, but especially developing countries are the ones that have suffered the most due to this (Biswas, 2006).

Figure 1.1  Illustration of benefits of sustainable water management.

On the other hand, agriculture sectors require at least 70% of ground water for irrigation. Nevertheless, this percentage could increase rapidly with the time because of the increasing population as well as field irrigation and distribution losses (Chartzoulakis and Bertaki, 2015). Finally, wastewater system plays a critical role in water management. Conventionally, the goal of wastewater treatment is to protect the ecological user life and ecosystem integrity. Nevertheless, each of the systems can work as whole system but with different approaches and several applications directly or indirectly obtained from each system. For instance, stormwater recovered can be used on urban gardening and carwash establishments, among others.

So far, the major research development has been focused on wastewater systems to remove toxic compounds and in a best exploitation and maximum production of high value-added products. Furthermore, one of the main aims of wastewater system is to remove the pollutants such as heavy metals, phosphorus, sulfur, nitrogen, or pathogens (Verstraete et al., 2009). As mentioned before all water systems have different characteristics, applications, and technologies. In this sense, the modular treatment concept can be a potential alternative to improve its efficiency from the point of view of approachability to improve, replace, update, or change the equipment without changing the entire system due the freedom it brings to each stage of the process of the system. For example, one of the most used technologies in wastewater treatment systems is an anaerobic digestion where the microorganism consumes the organic content from wastewater. This type of process could be a good example to use a modular concept because for instance with base on wastewater characteristics two or more types of anaerobic reactor can be adaptable for the entire process (Verstraete and Vlaeminck, 2011). The above facts and statements drive the necessity to develop the sustainable technology with a modular concept as a resource to have a better water management as well as a high recovery and production of value-added compounds low energy requirement and low or no impact on environment with a circular resource flow that can contribute to increase the sustainable development goals (Guest et al., 2009; Ma et al., 2013).

The present chapter focuses on the current status of urban water management including standards and guidelines. Issues regarding wastewater treatment and sustainability such as energy requirement, nutrient recovery, water quality monitoring, and modular modeling have been discussed in this chapter.

1.1.1. Urban water management: current state of the art

Urban water management includes managing multiple parameters such as water storage, treatment, collection, discharge, industrial effluents, wastewater treatment, and storm water collection. In general, urban water management requires the holistic approach for performance assessment of water sustainability by including the multiple parameters and criteria including wastewater management, storm water management, and water demand management. Fig. 1.2 represents the different aspects of urban water management for sustainable use of water. It can also be characterized by urban water cycle, which includes the water stream flow around the environment.

1.1.1.1. Wastewater management

The history behind of wastewater management is interesting in terms of all steps that are involved before obtaining the final product that basically is to remove certain compounds that come from human hygiene, food, pharmaceutical, and industrial activities. Furthermore, in addition to the previous sources in some countries, the stormwater is also included into the wastewater system. However, these actions depend on the structure that each location possesses that is closely related to the water directions they hold (Lofrano and Brown, 2010). Over the last century, significant changes have been made to the guidelines and legislation on wastewater management to further increase the pollution control and decrease the impact on ecosystem. These changes start with the Eight Report created by the Royal Commission on Sewage and Disposal in 1912, when for the first time, the inclusion of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) standard protocol was applied in wastewater effluents. After that, a cascade of new technologies, standard protocols, and different systems were developed, tested, certified, and patented. However, all this developed knowledge has been evolved through the time in different manners and different routes and every time each process began to be more specific in the direction of wastewater characteristics and concerning to the obtained products as an added value of the entire process (Brown and Lofrano, 2015; Hellweger, 2015; Villarín and Merel, 2020). Currently, a new concept to have a better exploitation and reliability of wastewater treatment process has been raised during the last decades. The main attribute that the modular system offers to the wastewater management process and specially in wastewater treatment plants is a high independence among all steps without disturbing the entire process flow.

Figure 1.2  The concept of urban water management for sustainable use of water has been illustrated.

1.1.1.2. Storm water management

The constant and growing urbanization derived from the imminent growth population around the world has undesirable effects in the natural water cycle because the hydrological cycle is disturbed by artificial paths mainly constructed by concrete with low filtration capacity. The above fact affects the water permeability to the groundwater, which has given a way to a new paradigm regarding the treatment of the stormwater management process during the last decades (Khadka et al., 2020). The new paradigm has not been focused on nature-based solutions such as in situ reuse, infiltration, and storage. Nevertheless, the above solutions have been addressed using different processes such as green roofs, permeable concrete, bio-retention cells, or rain gardens. All these technologies are contemplated through different approaches such as water-sensitive urban designs (WSUDs), low-impact development (LID), low-impact urban design and development (LIUDD), integrated urban water management (IUWM), or sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS), among others. All these approaches are designed in a specific way and according to the necessities of each place around the world in which they are implemented (Fletcher et al., 2015). Although, the use of the technologies mentioned above shows three considerable limitations in the moment of its development and application. Firstly, they cannot be used in all the urban places, for instance, the green roofs only can be used in some buildings or houses that were designed with this purpose; secondly, most of them have a high investment cost and maintenance, and thirdly, the efficacy in terms of water recovery and management is relatively low, which complicates its use and application on a large scale. Besides, once the stormwater has been recovered, most of it is discharged into the conventional drainage system (Saraswat et al., 2016). So far, the research has been focused to develop more suitable, efficient, and affordable technologies with low investment and maintenance costs. In this sense, the modular treatment concept represents a great opportunity to create a potential process that can contribute to solve above challenges in the sector of stormwater management.

1.1.1.3. Water demand management

The water demand in urban regions has been increased due to population burst and economic activities. Derived from the two above situations, the water demand has been faced challenges such as enough sources to provide quality water, water availability, increase demand from the final users, as well as process factors like high energy demand, high operation, and maintenance cost. Likewise, another critical factor is related to the environment and most specifically to climate change because the anthropogenic activities disrupt the water cycle causing changes in raining frequency, periodicity, as well as the intensity (Da-ping et al., 2011; Mishra et al., 2020). So far, most of the developed studies have been focused to generate models that include environmental and anthropogenic factors. Additionally, both factors function as a socio-economical characteristics and water demand at the site where the model has been limitedly applied or will be applied. Nevertheless, these models do not consider a drastic changes in landscape, land use, and urban development, as well as extreme climatic events that may occur over time (Moazeni and Khazaei, 2021; Sanchez et al., 2020). On another hand, to face the operational and process challenges, the modular system concept can be a suitable alternative to improve the entire water supply process through a fast update of the old technology, easy maintenance, and substitution of some equipment in specific steps of the process, as well as offer alternatives to increase the water management on specific approaches such as quality control that is one of the most important parameters to consider.

In summary, the management seeks to evaluate the impact of urbanization on water cycles. It requires an understanding the natural, predevelopment, and postdevelopment water balance. Similarly, Sustainable Water Management Improves Tomorrow's Cities Health (SWITCH) is a research program funded by European Union (EU) in 2006 to facilitate modified concepts in urban water management (Howe et al., 2011). The SWITCH framework has funded in four characteristics: (i) interactive institutional action that includes urban water bodies and water cycle, (ii) foresee the effect of urbanization through learning alliance approach, (iii) a long-term strategy development for sustainable urban water management, and (iv) an efficient development of storm water, wastewater, and urban water management systems. Finally, the framework considers all the aspects of the urban water system in the cities as well as its modification with respect to the changes that can happen in the future time. Likewise, the framework makes and emphasizes on the used technologies and their robustness, including the sustainability concept all the time. Nevertheless, around the world, each country and each city have their own programs or can follow some of the international protocols that may vary widely between them.

1.1.2. International conventions, guidelines, and agreements

According to the United Nations (UN), committee on cultural rights, social, and economic issues right to water statement, based on Article 11 and 12 of the International Covenant; everyone has the right to get the highest attainable standard of mental and physical health. Currently, two international global water conventions are active (Belinskij et al., 2020); the first one is the convention on the use and protection of international lakes and transboundary watercourses published in 1992, and the second one is the convention on international watercourses for its nonnavigational use published in 1997. However, whatever the international guidelines or protocols are implemented, they share three main principles regarding utilization, protection, and sharing the watercourse. Table 1.1 show the three principles and their main characteristics.

However, although the water management guidelines follow the three previous principles, there are still several challenges that need to be considered for the development and implementation of models for the improvement of water management systems (drinking water, stormwater, and wastewater). And mention how modular system/technologies will help (five to six sentences).

1.1.3. Tackling the problem: sustainable water treatment

There is no denying the fact that water scarcity has been a foremost problem all over the world. Moreover, overpopulation, climate change, pollution of coastal regions, and aquifers are continuously affecting the accessibility to sufficient quality water (Zhou et al., 2020). In general, toxic wastewater or sewage must be treated before being discharged or reuse. There are several pollutants which should be removed or treated as they affect both natural environment and human beings. These compounds when discharged in aquatic system results in increase organic load, which further leads to eutrophication. Similarly, hormonal disruptors are another group of pollutants that pose huge health risk to animals and humans such bisphenol A, pesticides, and several bleaching agents (Álvarez-Ruiz and Picó, 2020). In general, water treatment methods include several techniques such as physical, biological, and chemical methods. These treatments are designed in-order to achieve different levels of contaminant removal. Briefly, the physical treatment involves the screening to remove solids, large plastics, and grit by sedimentation. The biological methods mainly remove heavy metals, organic load, nitrogen, and phosphorus from the wastewater and sludge using technologies such as trickling filters, rotating biological contactors, anaerobic digestion, activated sludge process, aerated lagoons, and pond stabilization. Finally, the treated water effluent goes through advanced treatment systems where pathogens, viruses, and other bacteria are removed before discharging into the environment (Osorio-González et al., 2018). In this sense, the concept of modular system can be a good alternative helping to treat the wastewater generated from the different sources. The main advantage of modular concept is the independence that can provide to each system as well as its specificity for each process. Furthermore, the modular treatment has the flexibility to use separate modules or semi-interconnected systems that can be used as a partial treatment in the same place where the water facilities are placed. Additionally, modular system offers a wide variety of adaptability to obtain several by-products such as bioenergy, biofertilizer, nutrient recovery, and many more. Further, a widely and detailed discussion about the application of modular concept as a potential alternative to improve the water management will be performed in the next chapters.

Table 1.1

1.1.3.1. Low-grade energy

It has been approximated that global energy demand would increase by 50% from 2010 to 2040. Hence, it drives the need to design the energy efficient treatment and recovery process. The wastewater treatment currently consumed ∼4% of total energy consumption in the United States and the United Kingdom (Xu et al., 2015; Oh et al., 2010). Approximately, 17.8kJ/g chemical oxygen demand (COD) is present in municipal wastewater, which is five times higher than the energy required for the activated sludge process (Heidrich et al., 2011; Wan et al., 2016). Although, significant amount of COD-based energy is generally lost during microbial metabolism (Frijns et al., 2013). In the United States and Europe, more than 12 plants have been reported to achieve >90% of self-sufficiency energy (Gu et al., 2017). On the other hand, methane recovery from anaerobic process could provide 30%–50% of energy required during wastewater treatment (McCarty et al., 2011). In addition, if recovered energy from the process is used in the same or other process can be a potential alternative to decrease the carbon fingerprint or in some cases it neutrality could be achieved (Hao et al., 2015).

1.1.3.2. Nutrient recovery

In general, fraction of phosphorus and nitrogen applied as a fertilizer in agriculture ends up in the wastewater plant (Daigger, 2009). It was estimated that fertilizers account for >1% of greenhouse gas emission, while 90% of the emission comes from ammonium fertilizer production (Sheik et al., 2014). In addition, ammonia fertilizer is known to require high input energy during its production stage, which then requires a large amount of energy to undergo nitrification and denitrification procedure. Hence, ammonia recovery would be an option to save energy only if it is done with lower energy than its production stage (Daigger, 2009). Similarly, the recovery of phosphorus also holds importance as its finite resource, which will soon be exhausted. It generally enters the wastewater from industrial effluents, detergents, and fecal matter (Xie et al., 2016). If the phosphorus is not removed, it can end up in water bodies and ultimately affect the ecological integrity (Cordell et al., 2009). The several technologies are available for nutrient recovery such as bio-electrochemical recovery, crystallization, reversible adsorption, electrodialysis, bio-drying, ammonia stripping, alkaline humic acid recovery, and membrane distillation (Kehrein et al., 2020). However, nutrient recovery procedure generally affected by lower concentration of nutrients present in the wastewater effluent; hence, few should be considered the nutrient accumulation or magnification by physical, chemical, or biological means, the release of concentrated nutrients or the extraction of these concentrated nutrients by chemical or physical methods. Nevertheless, modular treatment allows to develop the model that can not only remove excess of nutrient such nitrogen, sulfur, or phosphorus from the water but can also reuse these extracted nutrients to grow forest trees as well as biofertilizers to increase the crop growth.

1.1.3.3. Sensing and monitoring

Water such as wetlands, streams, coasts, rivers, and estuaries are the most important sources of water for life, while most of them are polluted in most of the countries (Jiang et al., 2020). Hence, sensing and monitoring would allow the people to understand, improve, and protect the aquatic life and water quality by developing standards and management practices. For instance, water quality monitoring network is designed for protecting and managing the water environment by collecting the information on states of water systems.

Researchers have made immense efforts to further improve the monitoring network such as budget requirement, sampling frequency and duration, site selection, quality indicators, and many more (Behmel et al., 2016; Shi et al., 2018). In addition, World Health Organization (WHO) and environmental protection agencies such as USEPA, EPA, and EUEPA have published guidelines on monitoring activities and have been reviewed elsewhere (Behmel et al., 2016; Loo et al., 2012; Watkinson, 2000; Zhang et al., 2011). Water monitoring has evolved from lab-scale analysis to on-site monitoring and in-situ sensor-based monitoring, that helps in great manner to obtain a high knowledge in real time, which contributes to develop and adjust the water process management. Besides, the biosensor technology contributes to a sustainable development mainly in places where the water management has limitations related to infrastructure, that generate a high impact into the society (Viviano et al., 2014). Pollutant sensing and monitoring has been expanded from conventional stoichiometric analysis to spectrum-based analysis such as adsorption, scattering, and optical reflection. Biosensors are increasingly becoming popular in terms of detecting lower concentration of pollutants such as heavy metals, toxins, drugs, and pathogenic strains (Saini et al., 2019). Fig. 1.3 represents the pollutant sensing mechanism using sensors. The modular concept has an enormous potential to use in this context due to a separate and mobile module can be place, transport, or attach at the same place where the water management or process is performed.

Figure 1.3  Detection of specific type of pollutant using sensors.

1.1.3.4. Modular modeling

The concept of modularization is with a base of the separation of complex production systems, something that can be defined as a modular production. The modular system concept gained strength in the 1980s, with the concept to use a strategy that would allow the development and implementation of a variety of combinations of the different production modules (Schilling, 2000; Langlois, 2002; Hegde et al., 2003; Hellström and Wikström, 2005). Currently, the concept of modular systems has evolved through the inclusion of intrinsic factors and in some cases anthropogenic. The current framework in modeling, development, and implementation of production processes through modular systems has factors based on the concept of sustainability (economic, social, environmental) (Mannina et al., 2019). In this sense, the development and implementation of the sustainability concept in modular systems have been coupled with the constant and demanding change in environmental policies around the world as a prevailing objective for the success of these type systems (Hammad et al., 2019; Pakizer et al., 2020). Likewise, during the planning and design of modular systems, not only the factors mentioned above should be considered, because each system needs a different level of customization, in order to have a better adjust to the requirements of the system itself. Some of these factors are local conditions, in which the installation of modular systems has been a constant challenge to its success on an industrial scale. On the other hand, once the modular system model has been established, the optimization and standardization of the process must be carried out as a single system. This will allow cost reduction, which in turn will increase the profitability and efficiency of the modular system (Saliu et al., 2020; Chopra and Khanna, 2014). With the aim of reducing heterogeneity and increasing its functionality, strategies such as functional modularization and massive customization of modular systems have been proposed. The above strategies are based on the fact that when dividing a complex system into more detailed modules, it depends firstly; the product to be obtained and secondly; the purpose of the modular system itself. This is mainly due to the fact that, although the modules are independent, they form a whole, which can be called in terms of the process as an industrial ecosystem where the main advantage is that the modules can be operated and replaced by other modules with the same or different function (depending on the requirements of the complete system) (Benito et al., 2002; Zhu and Ruth, 2013). An example of this type of system is the processes to produce biofuels or secondary metabolites, in the management of industrial or agricultural waste, where some modules act as raw material suppliers, pretreatment units, and purification, among others (Pang et al., 2017; Fenoll et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2020). In this sense, the establishment of the modules and their complement between them is a challenging task during their planning and standardization, since when this type of modular systems presents a weak interdependence (high independence from each other), which is beneficial for the entire system during the optimization and standardization period. Therefore, the implementation and use of modular systems in production, purification, and recovery processes is an extremely attractive alternative. Likewise, this modular system can be the beginning of a combined system, where the modular process system can become a business model with some minor adjustments, which leads to the creation of industrial clusters in a fast and sustainable route.

1.1.4. Conclusion

The market of resource recovery from wastewater has been increased over the past years to meet the energy and elemental demands of societies. The focus on developing the circular water flow has increased along with the development of resource recovery routes to satisfy overall demand in most sustainable way possible. Several standards and convention are in-effect to implement the controlled and sustainable sharing of waterways across the world. On the other hand, developing ways to treat wastewater to achieve the standards laid by government before its reuse are under constant research. Furthermore, designing the water monitoring network is an essential aspect of sustainable water management.

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Chapter 2: Characteristic of wastewater and drinking water treatment

Saba Miri ¹ , ² , Javad Ghanei ¹ , and Satinder Kaur Brar ¹ , ²       ¹ Department of Civil Engineering, Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada      ² Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique - Centre-Eau Terre Environnement, Québec, QC, Canada

Abstract

According to the United Nations, 2.2billion people lack safe managed drinking water, and 4.2billion people lack access safety managed sanitation (clean water and sanitation goal). Wastewater and drinking water treatment plants play critical roles in the urban water cycle and access to the clean water. Characterization of the pollutants is essential for developing a more fundamental understanding of the unit operation's complex interactions and treatment processes. The treatment process involves applying engineering and science principles to remove or decrease pollutants to an acceptable level before reuse or discharge to the environment. This chapter aims to present an overview of wastewater and drinking water treatment infrastructure and the contaminants commonly found in sewage and drinking water (based on their size distribution) and introduce the current processes used to reduce their concentrations or remove them. This chapter identified some bottlenecks and limitations of drinking water and wastewater treatment facilities that can be removed using modular systems at the source of