Dr. Caliskaner was the principal investigator and project manager of one of the largest and most comprehensive research and technology development projects for wastewater treatment. The projects focused on increasing carbon diversion to save energy and increase treatment performance and capacity at Water Resource Recovery Facilities (WRRF). This 3-year primary filtration deployment and technology development project was funded by the California Energy Commission with multiple sponsors from industry, academia, professional associations, and public utilities. The project includes filtration of raw wastewater before the secondary treatment to achieve significant energy savings while increasing the plant performance and capacity. Linda County Water District, City of Manteca, and Los Angeles County Sanitation District were the demonstration project sites with quite different characteristics in size and wastewater quality.
The cloth disk primary filter (CDPF) system (supplied by Aqua-Aerobic Systems, Inc.) was installed at Linda County Water District (Linda) WRRF and was operated approximately for 3 years between 2017 and 2020. The Linda WRRF is a tertiary level WRRF located in, Olivehurst, CA approximately 40 miles north of Sacramento. The primary filter system has treated between 20 and 50% of the total wastewater flow to the Linda WRRF.
Primary filtration is estimated to save an average of $1.6 million per million gallons per day of average WRRF flow capacity over a 30-year period. Following conclusions were drawn from this project with respect to observed treatment performance of the PF system compared to primary clarifier (PC) system: