Wastewater Treatment

Wastewater Treatment

Is variable influent causing you treatment headaches and compliance penalties?

Wish you had earlier real-time influent insight so you could adjust treatment processes, save money, and have more predictable outcomes?

Want a no-touch monitoring solution that does all this for as little as $40 a day?

Calculate the Value a SENTRY System Will Bring to my Facility

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The SENTRY sensor platform provides real-time, minute-by-minute microbial metabolic activity that directly corresponds to how your treatment processes will be affected. It can be used for the following, depending on sensor location:

Understanding organic loading
Industrial discharge toxicity
Understanding the impact of I&I (rain events)
Identifying toxic/imbalance events
Determining seasonal impact on plant performance
Optimizing aeration efficiency
Optimizing carbon dosing
Identifying carbon requirements
Monitoring effluent wastewater quality

See SENTRY in Action

Frankfort WWTP,

KY, USA

Sewer Authority

Mid-Coastside (SAM)

Half Moon Bay, California

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Select a use case to learn more below:

The most challenging part of any treatment facility operation is a lack of real-time visibility into the characteristics of the wastewater being treated at any given time. Typically, operators are waiting five days for sampling results and when there’s an average of 27 problem events detected daily (as seen across our wastewater treatment clients), that’s a lot of process upset leading to operational headaches, additional costs, and environmental disasters.

Whether you’re working in a municipal WWTP constantly faced with upstream industrial dischargers altering your plant’s influent without warning or if you’re responsible for industrial wastewater treatment, our bio-electrode sensor platform provides real-time, minute-by-minute microbial metabolic activity that directly corresponds to how your treatment processes will be affected by the influent.

For municipalities, our sensor platform uniquely detects changes in influent that can adversely affect your treatment performance. Sudden changes to influent characteristics can lead to effluent violations, impaired water quality standards, and public scrutiny of your facility’s operation and management but with our bio-electrode sensor platform, municipal clients are saving upwards of $75,000 per year with an ROI of months vs. years.

And for industrial treatment operators, our sensor platform offers a whole new set of data to ensure optimized treatment and discharge.

At the end of the day, we take the instability out of wastewater treatment and ensure the predictable outcomes, cost savings, and energy savings you need for as little as $40 a day.

"I know I'm better protected because SENTRY gives me the early warning I need to take action."

Carl Grace,
Plant Superintendent,
Frankfort, KY

Feed-forward control is becoming a reality leading to energy savings. It’s no secret that aeration is the largest energy use in water resource recovery facilities (WRRF) - often using 60-70% of total energy - but current best practices rely on backend control. We uniquely provide feed-forward actionable information in WWRFs that, combined with flow, is a surrogate for organic load. And we offer multiple control strategies that can be implemented leading to a 30% energy savings.

Many significant improvements in energy efficiency have been applied to WRRF operations in the past decade, including fine-bubble diffusers, high-speed turbo blowers, variable frequency drives, and improved dissolved oxygen control strategies. A factor that has limited further improvement is the lack of real-time data about the concentration of organic matter in the wastewater. We have now removed those limitations using our proven sensor platform and operating personnel now know the actual oxygen demand based on our sensor data and can respond in real time to changes to influent characteristics, like organic slug loads and toxic or inhibitory compounds.

As you’ve read so far, we uniquely provide a minute-by-minute signal that can be used to control equipment used in wastewater treatment processes. These signals can also adjust aeration and return solids flows in a feed-forward strategy to minimize aeration energy and reduce greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.

Learn more about how we optimized Wessex Water’s Aeration by diverting to the most efficient treatment stream

When used as an investigative tool, the SENTRY platform can even help identify users that may be contributing high concentrations of organic wastes that are interfering with your plant’s performance. When placed in a monitoring manhole, our bio-electrode sensors can detect off-spec wastewater and automatically trigger a sampling event. This reduces the overall labor effort needed to control discharge into the sanitary sewer system.

The potential uses of our SENTRY platform in an industrial environment are as varied as industry itself. In addition to the standard use of monitoring wastewater stemming from your industrial process, our bio-electrode sensors can provide information to your production staff about materials and mixtures, machinery conditions and limitations, and practices and procedures. When used as part of a holistic decision support system, our industrial customers maximize profits, minimize waste, and discover new opportunities for product innovation.

Our sensors do not measure cellulose, even though it is a carbon compound. However, most of the pulp and paper industry uses physical and chemical processes to transform cellulose into products. Whether the process uses mechanical or temperature manipulation, or chemical means to break cellulose fibers, a common byproduct of pulp and paper making is "black liquor.

We have been working with pulp and paper clients for over five years and have shown that our signal is responsive to black liquor. That means it can be used to estimate chemical and energy usage and allows correlation of wastewater strength to product type and mixture.

SENTRY’s innovative technology is providing the opportunity to avoid the use of predictive algorithms for nutrient control by basing nutrient control on a direct measurement of influent characteristics.”

Mark Firth, Production Manager,
Pulp & Paper

Ready to find out more?

View our Case Studies