Improving energy efficiency in the tertiary treatment of Alguazas WWTP (Spain) by means of digital twin development based on Physics modelling

The situation of water stress and desertification is worsening, especially in southern Europe, which is making it necessary to resort to water reuse as a key component of integrated water resource management. In addition, the new quality criteria defined by European legislation, both for water treated in WWTPs that is discharged into a particularly sensitive receiving environment, and for water reclaimed in tertiary treatment for reuse, are becoming increasingly restrictive. For all these reasons, it is necessary to keep up the pace of improving the WWP efficiency of the processes, based on their knowledge and through the application of new digital tools that allow these processes to be improved. DTCONEDAR has been conceived as an industrial research project, with a multitude of innovative aspects, necessary to advance in the digital transformation of the water industry 4.0, to respond to a current need in the water treatment sector like the implementation of digital twins, which in addition to using data from sensor measurements, use data calculated from simulators, which has already been successfully implemented in other industrial sectors. The incorporation of models using simulators has made it possible to reproduce in detail the behaviour of the processes, understand their dynamics and propose new control and automation strategies in the WWTPs. This project (AEI-010500-2022b-196) is subsidised thanks to the support grants for Agrupaciones Empresariales Innovadoras (AEI) of the Ministry of Industry with the aim of improving the competitiveness of SMEs within the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan funded by the NextGen EU.