GRASTAC

Description:

The GRASTAC project aims to advance in the biological nutrient removal from wastewater by the application of the emerging granular technology applied to SBR. In this respect this project intends to identify the basic knowledge about the granulation process (microbial activity of granular biomass for nutrient removal, population dynamics distribution and physical/chemical composition evolution of biological granules during the granule development and operation with variable composition wastewater. Apart from the basic knowledge, this project also intends to develop a new tubular granular SBR for nutrient removal with synthetic wastewater for a better process stability and performance. In this respect a lab scale pilot plant (30 litres) will be designed, constructed, started-up and operated for biological nutrient removal process. Afterwards, the granular technology will be applied to an available 1000 litres industrial pilot plant for technology validation in a full scale WWTP. On the other hand, in order to ensure process stability and performance in nutrient removal, the previously developed SICOTIN software will be adapted to the granular technology by including new data acquisition probes, adapting the advanced control modules of Case Based Reasoning (CBR) and Multivariable Statistical Process Control (MSPC) module to the granular technology. Also the advanced control module will implement a new Software Sensor module for the on-line identification of the key chemical compositions of ammonium and phosphate in order to achieve a more robust process control able to deal with the variable influent compositions while keeping the performance in nutrient removal from wastewater.