A smart centrifuge camera for testing dewatering ability of waste-water sludges in hyper-gravity

The EU produces more than 45000 tons of waste-water sludge per day as byproduct of municipal and industrial water purification activities.

This enormous amount can become a gold mine for materials recovery, or an environmental burden, depending on how well waste-treatment plants can remove water from these sludges.

Today sludge treatment processes are based on unoptimized methods, which rely on operator experience and low-tech equipment, and are not able to deal with the fast-changing sludge type evolution, resulting in loss of time, energy and money, as well as a negative environmental impact.The SludgeCam project will deliver an innovative smart camera centrifuge, having advanced software, hardware and sensing features, which will enable plant operators to consciously adapt treatment process parameters, select flocculant polymers and set standards for different sludge types, based on solid, reproducible data, so that more environmentally-friendly water treatment operations and drastically reduced energy consumption for sludge incineration will be achieved.