About half of a typical clean-water plant’s energy goes to aeration. It follows that pumping more air than necessary into the activated sludge process wastes substantial electricity.The team at the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago’s Stickney Water Reclamation Plant has embarked on a project to optimize aeration and so cut the blowers’ slice of the energy consumption pie by about 25 percent.They’re doing it by installing ammonia-based aeration control, a more efficient method than the traditional control based on dissolved oxygen (DO). “Ultimately, we want to be positioned so that when the system says there is too much
