Flat Plate MBR Energy Consumption—Village of Dundee, MI

In order to address growing demand and increasingly stringent permit limits, the Village of Dundee, MI upgraded their wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) from sequencing batch reactor (SBR) technology to membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology in June, 2005. Including a solids handling upgrade to aerobic digestion using membrane filtration, the total cost to retrofit the plant was 6.55M. Following the upgrade, effluent quality significantly improved, the capacity increased from 0.75 MGD to 1.5 MGD and solids handling costs decreased by roughly 35%. As expected, plant energy demand also increased, roughly doubling SBR requirements. This paper proposes methods for improving plant energy efficiency and cutting power costs by >50%.Although the plant has not been optimized for energy efficiency, the average demand of 1.44 kWh/m3 (MBR Zone demand