Sewage treatment is the process of removing contaminants from municipal wastewater coming mainly from household sewage and industrial wastewater. There are several physical, chemical, and biological processes that are used to remove contaminants to produce treated wastewater, called treated effluent, in a form that is safe enough to release into the environment. There are also several processes that are used to manage and dispose of sewage sludge, a residual, semi-solid material that is produced as a by-product during the sewage treatment of industrial or municipal wastewater. When we speak of “sludge,” we are talking about a product that is mostly water with lesser amounts of solid material that have been removed from liquid sewage. Primary sludge would include solids that are removed via settling tanks called clarifiers that are built to remove the solids being continually deposited by sedimentation.
Treating sludge is primarily focused on reducing the water to reduce sludge weight and volume in order to reduce health risks and disposal costs. To reduce infectious microorganisms like viruses and bacteria, the treatment is normally accomplished through heating during digestion or incineration. Energy may also be recovered from sludge through the methane gas produced during anaerobic digestion.
Experts in wastewater, sewage, and sludge treatment are normally going to be engineers and chemical experts with experience in things like anaerobic digestion and fermentation. Large renewable energy and biochemical consulting firms certainly have experts in biotechnologies, as well as the more common areas like bio and renewable fuels, biomass and biomass power, feedstocks, biomaterials, and biochemicals. These larger groups will also have expertise in other technologies like agitation systems, beverage fermentation, bio-oil extraction, bioreactors, carbon capture, carbon storage, carbonization, catalysis, cellulosic ethanol, cleantech, combined heat and power, direct combustion, enzyme technologies, fermentation, Fischer-Tropsch, gasification, genetic engineering, hydrothermal, nanotechnology, organosynthesis, power generation, pyrolysis, renewable technology due diligence, synthetic biology, thermochemical conversion, torrefaction, water treatment, and waste management.
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