RESEARCH THEME 1

Improving
technologies

Investigating existing and alternative technologies

In this theme, we will be looking at improving existing wastewater treatment processes/technologies and current beneficial routes as well as investigating new alternative technologies to reduce biosolids volume and transform them into high-value products. Existing processes such as anaerobic digesters and advance treatment methods such as drying, thermal hydrolysis, pyrolysis, gasification and hydrothermal liquefaction will be studied in depth for benchmarking to realise their techno-commercial potential in different scenarios (i.e. urban versus regional water utilities).

Theme Statistics

$4 million

Cash and in-kind

12

Industry Partners

4

Australian and International University Partners

Research Project 1A

Novel biosolids processing routes for next generation, high quality products

The agricultural application of biosolids is likely to remain a major beneficial use option.

Research Project 1B

Enhancing resource recovery through thermal/hydrothermal processing

There is currently no broadly applicable, non-agricultural beneficial use option for biosolids.

Research Project 1C

The impact of microbial ecology on operation of biosolids treatment trains

Investigation into which microbiological processes directly impact the properties of the biosolids during anaerobic digestion or products from the advanced transformation of biosolids studied in Theme 2.