TY - JOUR
T1 - Review of cost versus scale
T2 - Water and wastewater treatment and reuse processes
AU - Guo, Tianjiao
AU - Englehardt, James
AU - Wu, Tingting
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - The US National Research Council recently recommended direct potable water reuse (DPR), or potable water reuse without environmental buffer, for consideration to address US water demand. However, conveyance of wastewater and water to and from centralized treatment plants consumes on average four times the energy of treatment in the USA, and centralized DPR would further require upgradient distribution of treated water. Therefore, information on the cost of unit treatment processes potentially useful for DPR versus system capacity was reviewed, converted to constant 2012 US dollars, and synthesized in this work. A logarithmic variant of the Williams Law cost function was found applicable over orders of magnitude of system capacity, for the subject processes: activated sludge, membrane bioreactor, coagulation/flocculation, reverse osmosis, ultrafiltration, peroxone and granular activated carbon. Results are demonstrated versus 10 DPR case studies. Because economies of scale found for capital equipment are counterbalanced by distribution/ collection network costs, further study of the optimal scale of distributed DPR systems is suggested.
AB - The US National Research Council recently recommended direct potable water reuse (DPR), or potable water reuse without environmental buffer, for consideration to address US water demand. However, conveyance of wastewater and water to and from centralized treatment plants consumes on average four times the energy of treatment in the USA, and centralized DPR would further require upgradient distribution of treated water. Therefore, information on the cost of unit treatment processes potentially useful for DPR versus system capacity was reviewed, converted to constant 2012 US dollars, and synthesized in this work. A logarithmic variant of the Williams Law cost function was found applicable over orders of magnitude of system capacity, for the subject processes: activated sludge, membrane bioreactor, coagulation/flocculation, reverse osmosis, ultrafiltration, peroxone and granular activated carbon. Results are demonstrated versus 10 DPR case studies. Because economies of scale found for capital equipment are counterbalanced by distribution/ collection network costs, further study of the optimal scale of distributed DPR systems is suggested.
KW - Distributed
KW - Optimization
KW - Reuse
KW - Scale
KW - Size
KW - Water
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U2 - 10.2166/wst.2013.734
DO - 10.2166/wst.2013.734
M3 - Review article
C2 - 24473289
AN - SCOPUS:84896868840
VL - 69
SP - 223
EP - 234
JO - Water Science and Technology
JF - Water Science and Technology
SN - 0273-1223
IS - 2
ER -