The fundamentals of waste water sludge characterization and filtration

The move to greater emphasis on the disposal of waste water sludges through routes such as incineration and the added cost of landfill emplacement puts high demands on dewatering technology for these sludges. A clear problem in this area is that waste water sludges are slow and difficult to dewater and traditional methods of laboratory measurement for prediction of filtration performance are inadequate. This is highly problematic for the design and operational optimisation of centrifuges, filters and settling devices in the waste water industry. The behaviour is assessed as being due to non-linear behaviour of these sludges which negates the use of classical approaches. These approaches utilise the linear portion of a t versus V-2 plot (where t is the time to filtration and V is the specific filtrate volume) to extract a simple Darcian permeability. Without this parameter, a predictive capacity for dewatering using current theory is negated.