The sludge treatment reed bed is a sustainable sewage sludge management technology that offers promising sludge dewatering and stabilisation, due to its low energy and labour requirements, and minimal operating and maintenance costs. Despite numerous existing studies and increasing applications of sludge treatment reed bed in both developed and developing countries, the lack of standard system configurations and operating regimes led to several operational problems, including bed clogging and poor dewatering and mineralisation efficiency. Sludge dewatering and stabilisation in STBRs are complex processes governed by system- and operation-related factors such as the substrate media, macrophytes, loading regime, sludge characteristics, and climate conditions. Rather than the complex experimental study, process-based modelling has become a promising approach to investigating the influence of specific factors on the efficiency of sludge dewatering and stabilisation. This paper presents an overview of the critical system and operating parameters in sludge treatment reed beds and a summary of the interactions between the factors. Then, a framework of process-based modelling is proposed, which provides a useful platform to study the interactions of operating parameters and other factors in the complex processes of sludge dewatering and stabilisation, which supports the system design and optimisation of sludge treatment reed beds.
The conventional method of simulation using fixed mesh method (FMM) of discretization is a well-known and trusted procedure in modelling hydraulic dynamics. However, new ideas of innovation in modelling should be advanced. The moving mesh method (MMM) has been considered as a novel approach in modelling hydraulic dynamics after depending on the existing simulation model for decades. The MMM is capable of describing the moving boundary condition of an actual wetland system due to water ponding. An idealized model should be able to simulate the actual hydraulic flows through the system with the corresponding porosity. Hence, a combination of MMM and FMM (MM-FMM) of discretization for hydraulic dynamics is studied in this project to model the flux with respect to water ponding scenario in a sludge treatment reed bed and unsaturated transient flow within the bed. Such method has evidently proved to simulate the actual hydraulic flows in contrast to conventional method. The application of MMM limits the maximum flux to keep within its saturated conductivity, thus reduces the effect of flow overprediction. Subsequently, the simulated results for hydraulic head and moisture content can be predicted for actual condition of different cases according to their respective fluxes.
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