Biological nutrient removal in a UCT-MBR pilot

In the last years, there has been an increasing awareness about the environment pollutionprotection. As a consequence, the Environmental Regulation has increased the emission limitsimposing, for instance, lower concentrations at the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) outlets.As a consequence of this fact, several WWTPs are not able to respect the emission limits andneed to be upgraded. In view of such needs new technology are emerging and new WWTPsolution schemes are being realized. With respects to the nutrient removal enhancing, a possiblesolution can be the UCT-MBR which couples the University of Cape Town scheme with aMembrane Bioreactor. In the light of such considerations, the study presents a survey about theperformance of a UCT-MBR pilot plant, which may offer high performance in terms of carbonand nutrient removals. Specifically, a UCT-MBR pilot plant has been designed, realized andmonitored with the aim of investigating the efficiency in treating real municipal wastewater. Thepilot plant has been operated for a period of 165 days during which an extensive data gatheringcampaign has been carried out. The pilot-plant showed good performances in terms of effluentpollutant concentrations. Further, although the pilot plant showed an overall good efficiency interms of both carbon and nutrients removal, nitrogen and phosphorus removal efficienciesshowed sometimes negative efficiencies fluctuations likely due to sporadic discharges ofindustrial wastewater and landfill leachate. Such a fact was justified by assuming a sensitivity ofthe heterotrophic biomass during the biological phosphorus and denitrification removalprocesses.