Waste-to Energy Facility
A municipality owns and operates two Water Reclamation Facilities (WRFs) which provide sewer services for the county. The un-stabilized biosolids generated from these two WRFs currently are dewatered and hauled to a landfill for disposal. The municipality would like to construct a waste to energy facility that will take the dewatered biosolids from the two WRFs, mix it with other high strength waste from sources within the municipality and from surrounding areas to create digester gas to generate either electricity or compressed natural gas (CNG).
Students will design a new waste-to-energy facility (WTEF) to be located in a 25 acre site owned by the municipality. The consulting firm American Structurepoint, Inc. is the project sponsor and will be mentoring the senior design team during their design of the WTEF for the municipality.
UPDATE
Our team has partnered with American Structurepoint to design the site layout and facility of an anaerobic digester system. The digester will be processing waste from two wastewater treatment plants and one high strength waste stream. The system will contain a mixing pit, grit removal process, a pretreatment process which will lead to the digester, a gas cleaner, a generator that will create electricity from the cleaned biogas, and a solid/liquid separator that will dispose of additional solid waste as fertilizer. It is projected that the system will produce 16976.04 lbs gas per day and 131.25 tons of fertilizer cake per day. Overall, the waste-to-energy system will be converting 140,000 GPD of waste into electricity and heat for use.
The second part of the project is designing the site for the waste to energy facility. This includes buildings to house the processes, roadways around the site, and piping between the processes. The site will also have to be appropriately graded to divert stormwater to a retention pond. All of these elements, including the digesters, will then be put together in a full site layout.