Join us at the 2024 IWA World Water Congress!

Next week in Toronto, thousands of leading water organizations and professionals are gathering at the Internation Water Association World Water Congress to share and learn from each other about shaping and delivering solutions across the full water cycle. Associated Engineering is pleased to be a gold sponsor of the Canadian Pavilion, as well as supporting the Young World Water Camp featuring 30 future leaders representing 14 countries!

In the technical program on Monday, in Session 2.35 at 1:30pm is our presentation titled "Pharmaceutically Active Compounds in Wastewater: A Review of Occurrence, Regulatory Framework and Removal Methods", authored by Shahab Minaei, Soubhagya Pattanayak, and Dean Shiskowski.

Pharmaceutically active compounds (PhACs) have become an emerging public concern because of their prevalence and persistent nature. These compounds are engineered to exhibit significant activity even at minimal concentrations, which raises alarms about their potential adverse effects on exposed organisms over extended periods. With the advancement of analytical techniques, a growing body of literature is addressing the presence of PhACs in various environments and their associated toxicological effects. Nonetheless, there is a gap in thorough understanding of regulatory landscape to establish the discharge limits as well as the effectiveness of the existing wastewater treatment technologies in reducing PhAC concentrations to non-toxic levels. In this context, this review will provide an overview of PhAC occurrence, current regulatory frameworks, and removal methods.

Also in the same program session (2.2), a pair of our posters will be featured:

Enlarged Anaerobic Zone – Evolution of EBPR Design in MBR | Soubhagya Pattanayak, Dean Shiskowski, Daniel du Toit

Undersizing anaerobic zones has led to poor performance of enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) in many wastewater treatment plants. In a greenfield 70 MLD membrane bioreactor (MBR) project in central Alberta, an important objective was to meet stringent P limits. Simulations to evaluate the impact of different anaerobic zone mass fractions on EBPR were conducted and a large anaerobic zone (mass fraction ~ 15%; volume fraction ~ 23%) was chosen for final design.

Effect of Extended Solids Retention Time (SRT) on Enhanced Biological Phosphorus Removal (EBPR) Kinetics in a Membrane Bioreactor Process | Rony Das, Soubhagya Pattanayak

There is an ever-increasing demand from Water Resource Recovery Facilities to optimize solids production and subsequent processing. The enhanced biological phosphorus removal process (EBPR) operated at extended solids retention time (SRT) could be an attractive and sustainable in-situ treatment solution to achieve low sludge yield. We investigated the performance of a membraneassisted EBPR process for a set of SRTs (25, 40, 60, and 80 days) in a dual-train parallel system fed with municipal wastewater. The objectives of the study were to (1) determine sludge yield at different SRTs, (2) characterize P-removal performance at extended SRTs, and (3) determine if distinctive microbial populations are associated with "normal" and "extended" SRT systems.