American Filtration and Separations Society

Wastewater Treatment/Sludge Dewatering

This course is not currently scheduled.

Wastewater Treatment/Sludge Dewatering , .4 CEUs,
Bart Peeters and Ernest Mayer, instructors

Wastewater Treatment/Sludge Dewatering – Wastewater Treatment (WWT) is a universal technology used at almost all industrial and municipal plants. As a consequence, many plant engineers devote considerable effort to understand and operate wastewater treatment plants without much training (except for the environmental engineering graduates).

This half day course is intended to educate plant engineers on some of the treatment technologies employed, some of the pretreatment techniques used, and the sludge dewatering options (particularly centrifuges, belt filter presses and filter presses.) Sludge testing methods will also be discussed along with demonstrations of turbidity and capillary suction time (CST) methods.

Most important personal experience is that very small changes in centrifuge settings can have an amazing huge impact on the performance of a centrifuge.

An at first sight tiny change in pool depth of 20 mm,
an at first sight tiny change in bowl speed of 100 rpm
can make simply the difference between bad and excellent performance!
And that’s what makes optimizing a decanter centrifuge simply fascinating!

Bart Peeters

About the Instructors

Bart Peeters is an environmental technology engineer with Monsanto Europe NV, Antwerp, Belgium, since November 2004 with particular responsibilities involving wastewater treatment and sludge handling. Previously, he was a process improvement engineer in polymer manufacturing for six years. In 2007 Bart was awarded the exceptional distinction of Technology Specialist and one year later he received a prestigious Monsanto Manufacturing Distinction Award.

Work experiences include the process optimizations of two solid bowl decanter centrifuges at the Monsanto Antwerp site. A first application dealt with the optimization of a decanter at the polymer manufacturing plant, while the other optimization was at the WWTP concerning the mechanical dewatering of activated sludge with a decanter centrifuge and consecutive thermal drying of the sludge cake in a flash dryer, all in one compact machine. Bart published 8 papers mainly dealing with these two centrifuge optimizations and is teaching short courses/seminars on the working of decanter centrifuges within and outside the company.

He holds a Master of Industrial Science in Biochemical Engineering (ing.) from the Institute of Technology De Nayer in Mechelen, Belgium (1996), plus a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering (ir.) from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (1998). Bart received Six Sigma certifications as Green Belt (2004), Black Belt (2006) and Master Black Belt (2006), the latter handed by SigmaPro Inc in St-Louis, US.

He is a member of the KVIV (the Society of Civil Engineers in the Flemish region of Belgium) and the AFS Society.

Dr. Ernie Mayer is a Senior Consultant with DuPont, Wilmington, DE specializing in SLS technology since 1980. He received his B.S. and M.S. Chem. Eng. Degrees from Columbia University, New York City, NY and Ph.D. in Chem. Eng. From U. of Delaware, Newark, DE. Dr. Mayer has a brilliant professional career, among his numerous awards are Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, Deans’ Lists, 3 Eng. Excellence Awards, 7 Environmental Respect Awards; Class ‘A’ bonus, AFSS Frank Tiller award in 1996, AFSS Fellow award in 2000, and Lifetime Achievement award in 2005 (first non-academic to receive it). He is a member of AWWA, AlChE, WEF, and AFSS (Board of Directors since 1988, Chairman of Chapter Affairs/Users Committee; plus member of three other committees). He has organized/chaired three technical conferences ; Co-chair of World Filtration Congress in 2004 and Chair of the 2008 Filter Testing Conference. He published over 200 papers/publications and has 2 patents. In 1991, a remediation technology developed by him was accepted into the EPA SITE program. At the request of President Jimmy Carter, he was asked to participate in the Three-Mile Island nuclear cleanup in 1980. His name is listed in Who’s Who in America; Who’s Who in Science and Environmental Technology; etc.