In the early 1990s, the Jackson Pike Wastewater Treatment Plant in Columbus, Ohio, upgraded its single-stage anaerobic digestion system.
That change, aided by the industry’s first large installation of multi-port sliding valve mixers, plus improved heating and continuous sludge feeding, would enable six digesters to do work that required 16 digesters under the earlier two-stage process.
But boosting the new system to peak efficiency depended on finding the right recipe to feed it. After six years of experimenting, with the help of automatic sampling, Jackson Pike found the key to fine-tuning its new system, and a new way to cut costs and
