An Efficient Way to Turn Wastewater into Fresh Water

Missouri S&T researcher Jianmin Wang has developed a wastewater treatment system that is more efficient and uses less energy than conventional methods.

A Missouri University of Science and Technology professor has shown that improving wastewater treatment and saving energy are not only essential, but they’re also compatible.

Dr. Jianmin Wang, professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at Missouri S&T, has developed multiple wastewater treatment technologies that produce freshwater that is not only cleaner than wastewater treated using traditional methods, but also requires less maintenance and energy. Additionally,  his inventions can be used to retrofit existing wastewater treatment plants.

On Feb. 6,  Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon announced nearly $1.1 million in grants for the Small Community Engineering Assistance Program, implemented through the Department of Natural Resources to help communities with wastewater engineering costs, whether it’s commissioning a report or making repairs and upgrades.

Although his technology is too new, in regulatory terms, to be of use in the grant recipient communities, Wang says his technology is superior to existing ones in terms of cost and treatment efficiency.

Wang will discuss his treatment systems during a presentation titled, “Harnessing Energy and Freshwater from Wastewater: Reversing the Environmental Footprint” at 3:30 p.m., Friday Feb. 27, in Room 314, Butler-Carlton Hall on the Missouri S&T campus.

Part of his talk will focus on comparing how much energy existing systems use and how much his can save.

Wang says 0.8 percent of America’s energy use is spent on wastewater treatment. Much of that energy is used to aerate the tanks where wastewater is treated. The energy is used to feed oxygen to the microorganisms that consume the waste, and traditionally wastewater treatment plants maintain an oxygen concentration of 2 milligrams per liter to feed the bugs in the tanks, “which makes them happy,” Wang says.

The prevailing thought has been that providing less than 2 milligrams per liter of oxygen would make the microorganisms “unhappy.” But Wang does not believe that is an issue, saying that if you feed them at a lower concentration, such as 0.5 milligram per liter, it makes them a little less happy, but the microorganisms will live longer and enrich more – plus you use 30 percent less energy during oxygen infusion to produce the same results.

“You can make them a little unhappy,” Wang says, “because bugs do not have a union.”

He has also developed another treatment system called an Alternating Anaerobic-Anoxic-Oxic (A3O) process that “can achieve superior effluent quality since it can remove organic pollutants plus nitrogen and phosphorous nutrients,” Wang says. It does this without chemicals, and its effluent contains only 5 milligrams per liter of total nitrogen and 0.5 milligram per liter of total phosphorous. It also saves more than 10 percent of energy compared to the conventional pre-anoxic process, which has significantly less total nitrogen and total phosphorus removal.

With its high performance, high energy efficiency and low operational costs, on a large scale the technology could help curb global surface water eutrophication, which is one of the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges – the accessibility of freshwater.

Read more: Missouri S&T researcher cleans wastewater