Unionized Ammonia + BOD Treatment; Penal Hospital Wastewater Treatment Plant; Basic Engineering

Treating hospital wastewater directly at the source is an efficient way of targeting hard-to-treat contaminants.

The warm climate in Trinidad lends itself to excellent contaminant reduction using a biological treatment process; a sequencing biological reactor (SBR) in this case. An SBR is one reactor that cycles through several steps for each batch of water treated, generally: fill, react, settle, draw, and idle.

Several SBRs can be used in parallel to handle large flow rates, and plug flow instead of batch is also possible.

Schematic diagram of the SBR:

The solution identified for Penal was the latter, with UV treatment for supernatant disinfection and filter bags for sludge drying.

Location: Penal, Trinidad