Description du projet
Une alternative peu coûteuse au traitement des boues d’épuration
Le traitement des eaux usées urbaines s’est amélioré dans toutes les régions d’Europe au cours des dernières décennies. La plus grande partie du flux d’eaux usées qui entre dans une station d’épuration est évacuée et peut être réutilisée. Ce qui reste est une suspension diluée de solides qui a été capturée par la station d’épuration, appelée boue d’épuration. L’incinération est considérée comme la méthode d’élimination la plus sûre des boues d’épuration, mais elle est relativement coûteuse et pose des problèmes techniques complexes. Le projet HTCycle, financé par l’UE, présentera une meilleure alternative à l’incinération. Il commercialisera une technologie exclusive de carbonisation hydrothermique qui devrait augmenter la quantité de boues converties en produits de grande valeur tels que du carburant, des charbons actifs pour le traitement de l’eau, du phosphore et des matériaux d’assainissement des sols.
Objectif
Efficient municipal waste-water treatment, such as the systems currently in place in most European municipalities, produces vast amounts of sewage sludge. The latest data collected show a yearly production of 9.637 thousands of tons in the EU28 countries. Sludge treatment issues are often neglected in comparison with water-related parameters which results in serious technical difficulties and highly expensive disposal methods. As a result, an energy efficient, environmentally sound and economically viable process for sludge disposal and reuse of valuable resources e.g. phosphorus hardly exists.
The most common disposal methods for sludge are spreading on agricultural soil, composting and incineration. Land-filling has been long banned, the use as fertilizer, although very moderate in costs, is being banned in many regions due to concerns about contamination of soils with heavy metals and endocrine disruptive compounds. Composting raises the same concerns, and it is a labour-intensive and unsafe process, which leaves incineration as the most used option, albeit an expensive and not effective one. Incineration entails the highest costs (80-110 € /ton), but is also considered the safest disposal method and is fast growing and widely adopted. It presents also technical difficulties, such as the low overall efficiency of the process, the huge logistic efforts required to transport the sludge to the incineration plants, or the disposal of the ashes after the sludge has been incinerated.
In this situation, our company, AVA has the objective to demonstrate and commercialize our proprietary technology for hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) of sewage sludge, showing clearly technical and economic ad-vantages against the current sludge incineration method. We aim to increase the amount of sludge converted into high value products such as fuel, activated carbons for water treatment, recovered phosphorus, soil remediation material, carbon sequestration schemes and other applications. The HTCycle process turns the present sewage sludge disposal (incineration) from a costly process into an income-generating activity.
Champ scientifique
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwaste managementwaste treatment processesrecycling
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwater treatment processeswastewater treatment processes
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencessoil sciencesedaphology
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuels
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringnatural resources managementwater management
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinateur
17390 MURCHIN OT RELZOW
Allemagne
L’entreprise s’est définie comme une PME (petite et moyenne entreprise) au moment de la signature de la convention de subvention.