Experimental study on hydrothermal treatment of municipal sewage sludge

Wastewater treatment plants produced large amounts of municipal dewatered sewage sludge with about 80wt% moisture content. High moisture content is the bottleneck of sludge treatment and disposal. Hydrothermal treatment could economically disrupt sludge cells, release bound water and finally improve sludge dewaterability instead of thermal drying technology with high energy consumption. In this paper, hydrothermal treatment experiments were carried out and the combustion performance of the original sewage sludge and the hydrothermal treatment sewage sludge was analyzed to verify the possibility of burning after sludge hydrothermal treatment. The results show that the optimal reaction temperature, initial moisture content, pressure and time are 170°C, 87wt%, 0.9MPa and 40min, respectively, obtaining a final moisture content lower than 50wt% by centrifugation. Total Organic Carbon (TOC) results show that higher temperature and pressure, as well as longer reaction time are of benefit to the hydrothermal treatment of the municipal sewage sludge. Furthermore, Thermal Gravimetric Analysis (TGA) of the original sewage sludge and the hydrothermal treatment sewage sludge shows that a hydrothermal treatment can improve the combustion performance of the sludge, which is beneficial to the subsequent incineration process.