Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/741165
Project focus: Wastewater treatment nutrients, is an urgent global imperative. The biological treatment processes we use have been refined and optimised over decades and wastewater process innovation is oen a variation on a well-established theme. Wastewater treatment processes are expensive to build and have long design lives (typically 25-50 years). They are therefore infrequently replaced or upgraded. True novelty is rare and becomes even more so as scale increases. However, innovation in biological wastewater treatment is desperately needed to address the challenges we face. While we have decades of experience in designing and operating biological treatment processes, it is only in the last few years that we have started to really understand them, at the individual microbe and particle scale. Limited to what our experience tells us is likely to work, and given the implications of treatment processes not working, we have been understandably cautious and incremental development has prevailed. We need a model, a S e l w o o d P u m p & P l an t H i r e & S a l e s 1 9 4 6 - 2 0 1 6 Clean & wastewater pumping Selwood is the UK's leading supplier of high quality contractors pumps for rental and sale. Our range of pumps, specifically designed for sewage, sludge, wastewater and clean water applications, are built to cope with arduous conditions and offers maximum performance and reliability. Our rental fleet has one of the largest selections of diesel surface pumps and hydraulic, electric and explosion-proof submersible pumps in the UK. This is backed by some of the most qualified and experienced staff in the industry and a commitment to outstanding customer service. Call us today to find out how we can help with your pumping requirements. 023 8026 6311 www.selwood.co.uk @selwoodgroup SELWOOD Pump Rental, Sales & Service • Perspectives Dr Russell Davenport, Newcastle University's School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences said: "The water industry faces unprecedented global challenges, but wastewater treatment uses pretty much the same energy- intensive technology now as was being used decades ago. If the water industry is to move to a low energy, low carbon alternative that meets ever-increasing environmental standards, in an affordable way, it has to innovate. BE:WISE will help bring about exciting new collaborations to develop new approaches and solutions to these challenges." simulation, a virtual sand-pit (call it what you will) that we can use to explore and test options that are far beyond our experience and much too speculative to risk building at full scale. To build such a model, we need more than experience, we need knowledge. Knowledge based on sound science and robust experimentation using real wastewater at a large enough scale to reflect the complex interactions between the trillions of microbes that break down and treat wastewater in our treatment works. BE:WISE and the research it supports will create this knowledge and enable the development of tools that will help to reduce the costs and timescales of designing novel biological treatment processes. This will enable us to test many options and variations, to optimise processes before we build and commission them and to manage (nurture, curate, ultimately engineer) the microbiology in our existing processes with no risk to the environment and with few of the costs associated with site trials. This is why we are proud that this facility – the largest of its type in Europe – is based at one of our sites and that Northumbrian Water, alongside Newcastle University, is playing a key part in pioneering research which will hopefully have a significantly positive impact on how we treat wastewater in the future. 20 | NOVEMBER 2016 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk