Abstract
Because of being produced a great deal of excess sludges from biological wastewater treatment process, the subject regarding treatment and disposal of them has been significantly handled in real plants. It should be considered the alternative treatment with easy operating and cost effective process in rural areas. For the thickening of wasted activated sludge from small scale wastewater treatment facilities, thus, the provisional sludge thickening system was developed by the application of mesh filter module. Three meshes with different pore size(100, 150, $200{\mu}m$) were prepared for filter modules that were used to withdraw effluent from thickening system. A filter module with $100{\mu}m$ mesh was chosen as the most effective thickening material in the viewpoint of volume reduction and effluent quality: the volume reductions of initially injected sludge with 3,600 mg/L and 9,100 mg/L were 95% and 85%, respectively, and the filtered effluents were enough good to be shown below 1.0 mg/L of SS and 1.0 NTU of turbidity. Since the filtration of thickening was influenced by the cake layer formed on mesh filter module and this system was operated in the combination of sludge thickening with gravity settling, the filter modules with smaller pore size and the larger floc size were required for long term operation safely.
