Question

write a research about maintenance and technical issues in running a wastewater treatment plant .

Answer 1

A wastewater treatment plant comprises of primary, secondary and tertiary degree of treatment. Under which screening, grit chamber, primary sedimentation comes under the primary degree of treatment while the biological treatment comes under the secondary and further secondary clarifier and further sedimentation comes under tertiary degree of treatment.

Maintenance of the primary system is based upon the detention time and cleaning period of the chambers and tanks, for secondary the food to microorganisms ratio, Total suspended solids in the flow and the regulation of recirculation of sludge comes under maintenance and for tertiary again contact time and the detention time plays major role.

Technical issues :

With primary treatment generally excessive settlement of the sludge solids at the bottom of the tank make the process ineffective and inefficient. After which cleaning is very difficult and it takes a long time.

With secondary here we can use attached growth or suspended growth process but some common technical issues are :

Bulking of sludge : At times excessive numbers of filamentous microorganisms interfere with floc settling and the sludge becomes bulky. This bulking sludge settles poorly and leaves behind a turbid effluent.

Ponding and nuisance odor : In suspended growth system sometimes ponding occurs and due to the presence of organic matter very bad odor can be experienced

Sloughing of filter media : In attached growth system filter clogs due to the heavy substrate conversion by microorganisms.

Fly nuisance: Breeding of mosquitoes and flies are also experienced at filter media.

Tertiary treatment :

Denitrification, or sludge “popping,” are common issues for nitrifying activated sludge facilities. Sludge popping occurs when conditions in the clarifier encourage denitrification.