FOLENS E-Letter
My Lecture for FOLENS (FOLENS E-News No.2/June 2011): Water/Wastewater Engineering
Institute of Engineering, Division of Applied Chemistry:
Akihiko Terada, Masaaki Hosomi
This course consists of lectures and exercises on technologies for water/wastewater treatment. The 21st century is called as the century of “Water”. Due to population explosion and rapid development of industries since the late 20th century, the necessity of water/wastewater treatment has been growing day by day. In particular, not only “obviously visible” problems (e.g., odor, cloudy water, eutrophication and so on) but also “so far invisible but potentially detrimental” problems (e.g., release of pharmaceuticals to water bodies, resulting in emergence of drag-resistant microorganisms) have recently emerged, making issues on water/wastewater treatment more complicated.
Water/wastewater technologies are, above all, comprised of multiple processes, i.e., mixtures of physicochemical, chemical and biological processes. In order to understand the essence of water/wastewater treatment processes, studying unit operation, e.g. separation, flocculation, mixing, reaction and transport phenomena is of importance. Hence, the lecture parts focus on fundamentals of the unit operations and introduce how they are applied as physicochemical, chemical and biological processes.
The lecture parts also emphasize biokinetic and stoichiometry of microorganisms to predict biological processes, which is most difficult to control among all processes in water/wastewater treatment facilities, and introduce mechanisms of removals of organic carbon and nutrient (i.e., nitrogen and phosphorus). Application of computer simulation is a powerful tool to understand a biological process for water/wastewater treatment. The exercise parts in this course particularly focus on development of a mechanistic model to predict removal performances of biological treatment processes by using data on a real wastewater treatment plant. We wish such practice deepens knowledge of students in terms of principles of biological water/wastewater treatments and determinant factors to affect the performances, which are central to water/wastewater technologies.
In the end of the course, we plan to visit a real municipal wastewater treatment facility where students are able to integrate knowledge obtained from the lectures and exercises. Hopefully, students perceive that water/wastewater treatment and technologies are based on a multidisciplinary subject.
Water/wastewater technology is not basically the one producing something valuable. Therefore, reduction of capital and operational costs is essential. More importantly, technologies to be applied in developing countries are limited, depending also on economical conditions of a client, climate, residents close to a water/wastewater treatment plant, local regulation, and even way of thinking of local workers. These issues are essentially taken into consideration. To undertake construction of a water/wastewater treatment plant is not necessarily acceptable only to assemble advanced skills and technologies but requires multidisciplinary approaches based on a field-oriented concept –as practiced in the FOLENS program. We also convey this message to students throughout the course.