Wastewater Treatment and Technology
The outcome of the project was a new stacked tray design that improves grit removal performance
Ground-breaking project leads to advanced wastewater grit removal system An innovative two-year research project has been completed to optimise an advanced wastewater grit removal technology. Suspended solids carried in water can cause a range of harmful effects in rivers, lakes and oceans, making the capture and removal of these solids critical for effective environmental protection. To address this problem, the project – between Hydro International and the University of Exeter – focused on optimising the stacked trays that remove high levels of suspended solids from wastewater. By combining optimisation methods and computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the
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project was able to derive new designs for hydrodynamic solids removal components that would have been difficult or impossible to achieve using traditional engineering methods. The research was part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP), supported by Innovate UK, which ran until September 2021. It builds on years of collaboration between Hydro International and the University of Exeter in the field of CFD.
The core of the project involved the optimisation of stacked trays to remove high levels of suspended solids in wastewater, with the primary objectives being improved performance and reduced maintenance requirements. This was a complex, multiobjective, high-dimensional problem, so the team needed to adopt an unconventional approach in order to solve it. The team coupled Bayesian optimisation techniques and CFD modelling, using a
WATER INDUSTRY JOURNAL MARCH 2022
