Modeling of Wastewater Treatment Processes with HydroSludge
For wastewater treatment operators and researchers, HydroSludge lowers the barrier to using CFD for process optimization, but the work is incremental as it applies existing CFD methods with a user-friendly interface.
HydroSludge simplifies CFD modeling for wastewater treatment, reducing complexity and learning curve for operators, enabling efficient performance evaluation of Water Resource Recovery Facilities.
The pressure for Water Resource Recovery Facilities (WRRF) operators to efficiently treat wastewater is greater than ever because of the water crisis, produced by the climate change effects and more restrictive regulations. Technicians and researchers need to evaluate WRRF performance to ensure maximum efficiency. For this purpose, numerical techniques, such as CFD, have been widely applied to the wastewater sector to model biological reactors and secondary settling tanks with high spatial and temporal accuracy. However, limitations such as complexity and learning curve, prevent extending CFD usage among wastewater modeling experts. This paper presents HydroSludge, a framework that provides a series of tools that simplify the implementation of the processes and workflows in a WRRF. This work leverages HydroSludge to preprocess existing data, aid the meshing process, and perform CFD simulations. Its intuitive interface proves itself as an effective tool to increase the efficiency of wastewater treatment