Wastewater Treatment and Pollution Control

SuperPro Designer can be used to model, evaluate, and optimize any type of Wastewater Treatment, Water Purification, and Air Pollution processes. Since SuperPro also handles a wide variety of chemical manufacturing processes, it is an ideal tool for evaluating Pollution Prevention and Control options and practicing Green Chemistry and Sustainable Development. EnviroPro Designer, a subset of SuperPro, mainly focuses on wastewater treatment processes.

EnviroPro/SuperPro Designer is a valuable tool for environmental consulting engineers, process and product designers, development engineers and scientists, treatment/disposal plant engineers and managers. It enables the user to efficiently develop, assess, and optimize environmentally beneficial technologies. It provides under a single umbrella modeling of chemical manufacturing and end-of-pipe treatment processes, project economic evaluation, and environmental impact assessment.

Modeling of Wastewater Treatment Processes

EnviroPro Designer can be used to model, evaluate and optimize municipal as well as industrial wastewater treatment processes. It includes unit operation models for biological as well as physical treatment. The flowsheet below shows a simplified activated sludge process that treats industrial wastewater. EnviroPro also can be used to model and optimize nutrient (Nitrogen and Phosphorous) removal processes. For more info on nutrient removal, download the Evaluation version and have a look at the MUNWATER example (files b and c deal with nitrogen removal issues based on the Ludzack-Ettinger and Bardenpho processes).

Unit Operation Models

EnviroPro Designer features intuitive dialog windows for the initialization of unit operation models. In the following dialog window, the user initializes the kinetic data of Benzene biodegradation in an aeration basin. Notice the expression for the overall reaction rate and the blocks for specifying the substrate, other, and biomass terms. The data for the reaction rate constants (Kmaxo, To, and Theta) as well as the half-saturation constant for the substrate term (Ks) are retrieved from the component database but the user also has the option to overwrite them locally.

EnviroPro Designer is equipped with rigorous biological reaction models. The models can handle any number and almost any type of reactions (e.g., biochemical oxidation, biomass decay, hydrolysis of particulate matter, chemical oxidation, photolysis, adsorption on particulate matter, etc.). They can handle any number of biomass components (e.g., heterotrophic for biochemical oxidation and denitrification reactions, autotrophic for nitrification reactions, inactive biomass that decays, etc.). They support VOC emission calculations based on mass transfer and equilibrium-limited models that are accepted by EPA. Finally, they consider sorption of heavy metals and other compounds on sludge and track their fate.

Physical and Environmental Component Properties

EnviroPro Designer features extensive databanks of chemical components and mixtures. A User databank is provided for storing information on components created by the user. EnviroPro is also compatible with a version of DIPPR, a commercial physical property databank that includes highly reliable data for around 1,750 compounds.

The pure component databank includes thermodynamic (e.g., molecular weight, critical pressure and temperature, accentric factor, vapor pressure, density, specific heat, particle size, etc.) as well as environmental (e.g., diffusivities in water and air, biodegradation data, octanol to water distribution ratio, Henry’s law constant, component contribution to TOC, COD, BOD5, TSS, etc.) properties. The figure below shows some of the environmental properties for Benzene. The values of diffusivity (in water and air) are used for estimating emissions of this compounds from agitated (e.g., aeration basin) and quiescent (e.g., clarifier, thickener) tanks. The biodegradation parameters are used for estimating the extent of reaction of this compound in aeration basins (see second figure from top). The “Pollutant Categories” tab includes info used for regulatory reporting. More specifically, a compound can be classified as a volatile organic compound (VOC), Particulate, Acid Gas, ETG, CO, NOx, SO2, Base, etc. and this info is used in Emissions Reporting.

Versatile Material Balances

EnviroPro Designer performs material balances on individual chemical components as opposed to environmental stream properties (e.g., COD, BOD, etc.). This feature enables the user to track the fate (e.g., extent of biodegradation, volatilization, sorption on sludge, etc.) of regulated and other specific chemicals of interest in integrated water and wastewater treatment processes. Since wastewaters are typically complex mixtures of many compounds, the user may lump several components into one. For instance, Glucose on the dialog below represents all the soluble and easily biodegradable organic compounds.

EnviroPro Designer calculates a number of stream environmental properties (see figure below) based on the composition of streams and the component contribution to these properties. This information along with some other pertinent data are used to characterize waste streams from a regulatory and environmental impact viewpoint.

Additional Information

Go to the Literature page, scroll to the bottom and download the EnviroPro brochure and the paper on Water Treatment and Recycling.
Go to the EnviroPro page and scroll to the bottom to see a list of the papers written on EnviroPro.
Download the Evaluation and/or the Demo version of SuperPro and have a look at the five environmental examples that come with the software tool. Each example has a detailed ReadMe file.
Go to the Water Purification page for more info on water purification and recycling applications, production of ultrapure water, and a thorough example on water recycling at a semiconductor manufacturing plant.
Go to the Emissions page for info on emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from wastewater treatment plants and chemical manufacturing facilities.