Evaluating the Fate of Emerging Contaminants in Wastewater Treatment Plants through Plant-Wide Mathematical Modelling
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Evaluating the Fate of Emerging Contaminants in Wastewater Treatment Plants through Plant-Wide Mathematical Modelling Constantinos Noutsopoulos 1
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& Vera Charalambous & Elena Koumaki
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Received: 29 April 2020 / Accepted: 21 August 2020/ # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract
Wastewater treatment plants are one of the major routes transporting emerging contaminants (ECs) to the water environment. Mathematical modelling is an essential tool to assess the fate of ECs through wastewater treatment. In the context of this study, a plantwide mathematical model was developed and calibrated. According to the results, the dominant removal mechanisms have been identified for each target compound, thus confirming previously published data on their physicochemical properties. Solids retention time is an important operating parameter which highly influences the removal rate of most biodegradable ECs, while the performance of primary sedimentation, with regard to solids removal, influences the fate of both soluble and particulate fraction of ECs. Furthermore, the increase of solids capture rate in sludge thickening and dewatering units is associated with a decrease in ECs removal rate and their content in biomass. The hourly fluctuations in the inflow loads of ECs result in a variation of effluent ECs concentration with the same periodicity but with a significantly lower range. Keywords Emerging contaminants . Mathematical modelling . Wastewater treatment . Plantwide modelling . Sorption . Biodegradation
1 Introduction Organic micropollutants have attracted great attention from the scientific community due to their environmental fate and toxicological properties. Although most of the interest was usually concentrated on priority pollutants, over the last decade there has been a clear trend to study the so-called “Emerging Contaminants” (ECs) (Boix et al. 2016). “Emerging” * Constantinos Noutsopoulos [email protected]
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Sanitary Engineering Laboratory, Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering, School of Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 5 Iroon Polytechniou, Zografou, 15780 Athens, Greece
Noutsopoulos C. et al.
describes the micropollutants that attract scientific interest due to their origins, the new pathways to the environment or the new technical treatment (Gogoi et al. 2018), while the term “micropollutants” refers to the very small concentrations that occur in the environment (Kümmerer 2009). Today, more than 200 different ECs have been reported worldwide in river water and their concentrations are typically in the range of nanograms to micrograms per liter (Petrie et al. 2015). Despite their low concentrations, experimental data show that ECs have negative impacts on human and aquatic organisms and can cause harmful effects, such as structural, metabolic and sexual alterations in aquatic species, development of genes resistant to antibiotics and intermission of biodegradation activities in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) (Lahti and Oikari 2011; Cara
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