A Survey Overviewing Technological Aspects of Wastewater Treatment Facilities in the State of Tennessee

Abstract

Wastewater is produced from several industrial and anthropogenic activities and includes the sources such as showers, sinks, washing machines, dishwasher, toilet, etc. It contains microbes, pathogens, and several other organic and inorganic substances that are harmful to the environment and that must be removed before the water can safely be returned to natural streams. This sewage is pumped to the cleaning facilities through the drainage system. The treatment facilities called wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are operated in the cities at different capacities suitable to handle the water volume. Although all these facilities display a basically similar treatment process, there exists a few variations depending upon the capacities, location, cost of operation, population it serves, and type of contaminants required to remove.
In this research, a comprehensive report illustrating the different aspects of WWTPs in the State of Tennessee will be drafted. This will include evaluating and summarizing the similarities and variations among the different WWTPs: For example, some facilities implement chlorination methods in tertiary treatment unit; others, UV-based methods, and more advanced cases use UV photocatalysis, etc. The research will also include a general discussion about the pros and cons of these similarities and differences and recommend some potentially novel technologies. These may be susceptible of upscaling and adaptable to treat sewage more effectively and less costly. We believe that the outcome of this research will be useful information for potentially improving sewage treatment across the State of Tennessee of the current scenarios and provides a future direction.