Reducing the Cost of Sludge Treatment and Disposal by Implementing Thermal Hydrolysis for a Large Wastewater Treatment Plant

Conventional Mesophilic anaerobic digestion (MAD) is an established technology for sludge stabilisation prior to dewatering and disposal. The drawback of MAD is that it requires large digestion volumes and achieves a relatively low efficiency in terms of biogas production, pathogen removal and dewatering. As a result, many utilities are considering an additional thermal drying step for digested and dewatered sludge in order to achieve the minimum product volume with low pathogen levels. This is however, at the cost of substantial capital and operational expenditure. Pre-treatment of raw sludge with the Thermal Hydrolysis Process (THP) prior to MAD alleviates most of the challenges of conventional
digestion, dewatering and drying and reduces operational expenses.

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