E3.05 Bandara 2019 ReNUWIt Annual Meeting Poster

Urban wastewater is being realized as a resource from which water, energy, and nutrients can be recovered for beneficial uses. This upsurges the need for developing energy efficient technologies to treat alternative water sources of impaired quality to recover potable-quality water. Water authorities recognized urban wastewater as a renewable and dependable resource. The alga-based POWER* system developed under ReNUWIt funding has been demonstrated as an energy-efficient system for removing dissolved organic carbon and nutrients from primary effluent to the required discharge standards in a single step.

This study evaluated the feasibility of harvesting algal biomass and recovering potable quality water from the effluent of the POWER system by coupling it with a hybrid forward osmosis (FO) and reverse osmosis (RO) system. Water quality of samples collected from points across the existing wastewater treatment plant was compared against that of samples collected across the POWER/FO/RO system to demonstrate the viability of this system. Detailed chemical analysis of the product water from the integrated algal-membrane system met the primary and secondary drinking water standards during both winter and summer.