Smart Control for Energy-Efficient Wastewater Treatment
How might be better deploy real-time monitoring and control technologies (e.g. Microbial Electrolysis Cells) to improve the performance and energy efficiency of wastewater treatment processes?
This Dash explores how real-time monitoring and control technologies can improve the performance and efficiency of wastewater treatment processes.
Focusing on microbial electrolysis cells (MECs), the project investigates how dynamic control of electrical inputs can enhance treatment outcomes, reduce energy use, and enable resource recovery such as hydrogen production.
Wastewater treatment is energy-intensive and often operates under fixed or static control conditions that do not adapt to changing environmental or biological processes.
This creates several challenges: inefficient energy use, limited real-time optimisation of biological performance, difficulty scaling MECs, and gaps between laboratory innovation and real-world deployment.
Real-time control systems, data monitoring, and adaptive optimisation can be embedded into wastewater treatment technologies.
By integrating sensors, control algorithms, and remote monitoring platforms, operating conditions such as applied voltage can be adjusted dynamically, improving system performance, stability, efficiency, and scalability.