Eveline Volcke

Eveline Volcke
Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Green Chemistry and Technology

UGent 1999 Chemical engineer ; 2006 PhD in Applied Biological Sciences: Environmental Technology

About

182
Publications
59,967
Reads
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5,984
Citations
Additional affiliations
February 2007 - January 2008
French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE)
Position
  • Fellow
October 2009 - present
Ghent University
Position
  • Professor (Associate)

Publications

Publications (182)
Article
Full-text available
More measurements do not mean more information in WWTPs. A structured experimental design procedure is crucial to plan measurement campaigns and measure the right things.
Chapter
Full-text available
In recent years, the wastewater treatment field has undergone an instrumentation revolution. Thanks to increased efficiency of communication networks and extreme reductions in data storage costs, wastewater plants have entered the era of big data. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools have enabled the extraction of valuable...
Article
Biogas production from anaerobic sludge digestion plays a central role for wastewater treatment plants to become more energy-efficient or even energy-neutral. Dedicated configurations have been developed to maximize the diversion of soluble and suspended organic matter to sludge streams for energy production through anaerobic digestion, such as A-s...
Article
The effect of salinity on aerobic granular sludge treating fish-canning wastewater was evaluated through a one-dimensional biofilm model. The model was calibrated and validated with experimental lab-scale data regarding COD...
Chapter
Full-text available
This book describes theory and approach for a comprehensive and applied physicochemical model for wastewater treatment. These are reactions which occur without a biological mediator, and are critical to both the biology of wastewater treatment, and stand-alone chemical treatment units. The book includes description of acid-base theory, solution ion...
Article
In the pursuit of reducing carbon footprint and in view of increasing energy prices, energy efficiency is more important than ever before. Batch-wise operated aerobic granular sludge reactors consume up to 50% less energy compared to conventional activated sludge systems because pumping energy is reduced and mixing equipment is not needed. Further...
Chapter
Full-text available
Professor Gustaf Olsson has devoted countless hours over many years to Water Science and Technology, Water Supply and Water Practice and Technology as an author, reviewer, editor and Editor in Chief until finally stepping down from all functions in 2021. In order to honour Prof. Olsson's devotion and contribution to the journals, IWA Publishing has...
Article
Full-text available
Recovering phosphorus from wastewater in more concentrated forms has potential to sustainably recirculate phosphorus from cities to agriculture. The environmental sustainability of wastewater-based phosphorus recovery processes or wastewater-derived phosphorus products can be evaluated using life cycle assessment (LCA). Many LCA studies used a proc...
Article
Energy-rich sludge can be obtained from primary clarifiers preceding biological reactors. Alternatively, the incoming wastewater can be sent to a very-high-loaded activated sludge system, i.e., a so-called A-stage. However, the effects of applying an A-stage instead of a primary clarifier, on the subsequent sludge digestion for long-term operation...
Article
Full-text available
This work gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in modelling of short-cut processes for nitrogen removal in mainstream wastewater treatment and presents future perspectives for directing research efforts in line with the needs of practice. The modelling status for deammonification (i.e., anammox-based) and nitrite-shunt processes is presented w...
Chapter
Full-text available
With increased commitment from the international community to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from all sectors in accordance with the Paris Agreement, the water sector has never felt the pressure it is now under to transition to a low-carbon water management model. This requires reducing GHG emissions from grid-energy consumption (Scope 2 emi...
Article
Full-text available
Partial nitration‐anammox is a resource‐efficient pathway for nitrogen removal from wastewater. However, the advantages of this nitrogen removal technology may be counter‐acted by the emission of N2O, a potent greenhouse gas. In this study, mathematical modelling was applied to analyse N2O formation and emission dynamics and to develop N2O mitigati...
Article
Full-text available
This study deals with the application of data reconciliation to wastewater treatment processes which are subject to dynamic conditions and therefore do not reach a steady-state behaviour sensu stricto. The...
Article
Branko Kerkez, Kris Villez and Eveline I. P. Volcke introduce the Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology themed issue on data-intensive water systems management and operation.
Article
The formation of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) during anaerobic digestion (AD) imposes constraints on the valorisation of biogas. So far, inorganic sulfur compounds -mainly sulfate - have been considered as the main contributors to H2S formation, while the contribution of organic sulfur compounds is mostly neglected. This study investigates the fate of or...
Article
The application of aerobic granular sludge in continuous wastewater treatment plants is receiving increased attention. The introduction of better settling sludge in existing installations is expected to increase the plant’s treatment capacity by allowing a higher biomass concentration in the reactor. A lot of recent research has therefore focused o...
Article
Even though sulfur compounds and their transformations may strongly affect wastewater treatment processes, their importance in water resource recovery facilities (WRRF) operation remains quite unexplored, notably when it comes to full-scale and plant-wide characterization. This contribution presents a first-of-a-kind, plant-wide quantification of t...
Article
--- Free access until 29 Oct. 2021 via https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1djPi9pi-SaaL --- In municipal wastewater treatment plants, some dissolved methane can enter the aerobic bioreactors. This greenhouse gas originates from sewers and return flows from anaerobic sludge treatment. In well-mixed conventional activated sludge reactors, methane emissio...
Article
Partial nitration-anammox is a resource-efficient technology for nitrogen removal from wastewater. However, the advantages of this nitrogen removal technology are challenged by the emission of N2O, a potent greenhouse gas. In this study, a granular sludge one-stage partial nitritation-anammox reactor comprising granules and flocs was run for 337 da...
Article
Anaerobic sewage treatment is a proven technology in warm climate regions, and sponge-bed trickling filters (SBTFs) are an important post-treatment technology to remove residual organic carbon and nitrogen. Even though SBTFs can achieve a reasonably good effluent quality, further process optimization is hampered by a lack of mechanistic understandi...
Article
This work shows how more variables can be monitored with a single off-gas sampler on sequentially operated than on continuously fed and aerated reactors and applies the methods to data from a full-scale aerobic granular sludge reactor as a demonstration and to obtain insight in this technology. First, liquid-gas transfer rates were calculated. Oxyg...
Article
In this study, a biofilm model was developed for sulfur-based denitrification in a moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR), including mass transport as well as the conversion kinetics of sulfur-oxidizing bacteria (SOB). The experimental reactor simulated received a synthetic wastewater containing nitrate, sulfide and thiosulfate. The substrate affinity o...
Article
In industry, microaeration is often used for the removal of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) from biogas in full-scale biogas plants. This strategy is very successful when applied in a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR), but, due to the fluctuating concentration of H2S in biogas, it is challenging to achieve consistently high H2S removal in an sequencing...
Article
This study deals with the effect of aeration control strategies on the nitrogen removal efficiency and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions in a partial nitritation–anammox reactor with granular sludge. More specifically, dissolved oxygen (DO) control, constant airflow and effluent ammonium (NH4⁺) control strategies were compared through a simulation stud...
Article
Full-text available
Biotrickling filters are one of the most widely used biological technologies to perform biogas desulfurization. Their industrial application has been hampered due to the difficulty to achieve a robust and reliable operation of this bioreactor. Specifically, biotrickling filters process performance is affected mostly by fluctuations in the hydrogen...
Article
Heterotrophic denitrification and dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium (DNRA) are two microbial processes competing for two shared resources, namely, nitrate and organic carbon (COD). Their competition has great implications for nitrogen loss, conservation, and greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, a comprehensive and mechanistic understan...
Article
Ammonium removal is a key step in wastewater treatment which can be accomplished biologically. An interesting process option for this purpose is coupling partial nitritation with the Anammox process. The goal of the partial nitritation process is to convert half of the ammonium in the influent stream into nitrite, so both can be later converted int...
Article
Farm-scale anaerobic digestion is increasingly regarded as a greenhouse gas emission reduction measure. To get a full picture of its emission reduction potential, greenhouse gas emissions from digestate storage need to be assessed. This work quantifies methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from farm-scale mono-digested dairy manure by con...
Article
Wastewater treatment through anaerobic carbon removal followed by sulfide-based denitrification for nitrogen removal offers significant advantages over conventional processes in terms of decreased sludge production and reduced energy requirements. While the process has been demonstrated to treat wastewater with very high sulfate concentrations resu...
Article
Gas bubbles are introduced in water to absorb or strip volatile substances in a variety of unit operations, for example during (waste)water treatment. To calculate the transfer rate of substances between the liquid phase and the gas phase, different assumptions have been made in literature regarding the gas phase composition and hydraulic pressure,...
Article
Full-text available
Anaerobic pig manure digestion holds potential to contribute to a bio-based economy. This work assesses the stability of the thermophilic mono-digestion process. Thermophilic mono-digestion experiments with (i) fresh liquid pig manure and (ii) the fresh fecal fraction from source separation by a pig housing construction were conducted in semi pilot...
Article
Models adapt constantly, usually increasing the degree of detail describing physical phenomena. In water resource recovery facilities, models based on mass and/or heat balances have been used to describe and improve operation. While both mass and heat balances have proven their worth individually, the question arises to which extent their coupling,...
Article
A mechanistic model for ammonia removal in a countercurrent biological air scrubber was set up. This model was used to study the effect of the influent characteristics – air temperature, ventilation rate and ammonia load, on ammonia removal efficiency. Besides mass balances of the components participating in the biological conversions, the water ma...
Preprint
Full-text available
Denitrification and dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium (DNRA) are two microbial processes competing for nitrate and organic carbon (COD). Their competition has great implications for nitrogen loss, conservation, and greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, a comprehensive and mechanistic understanding of the governing factors for this compe...
Article
This study presents the start-up and 1-year performance study of two full-scale biotrickling filters or biological air scrubbers at a pig fattening facility in terms of ammonia removal and nitrous oxide production. Two newly-built multi-stage biotrickling filters were continuously monitored for these gases and for washing water characteristics. Alt...
Article
Wastewater treatment plants of the future aim at energy autarky. This could potentially be realized through a high-rate activated sludge (HRAS) process for organics (expressed as Chemical Oxygen Demand, COD) redirection followed by a mainstream partial nitritation-anammox (PNA) process for nitrogen removal. This combination of processes was evaluat...
Article
This study deals with the potential and the limitations of dynamic models for describing and predicting nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions associated with biological nitrogen removal from wastewater. The results of a three-week monitoring campaign on a full-scale partial nitritation reactor were reproduced through a state-of-the-art model including diff...
Article
Full-text available
In this study, the microbial community structure of two full‐scale biotrickling filters treating exhaust air from a pig housing facility were evaluated using 16S metabarcoding. The effect of inoculation with activated sludge of a nearby domestic waste water treatment plant was investigated, which is a cheap procedure and easy to apply in practice....
Article
An anaerobic digestion model was set up and applied to estimate desired methane production in the form of biogas as well as unwanted methane emissions associated with farm-scale digestion of manure. The generally accepted Anaerobic Digestion Model No. 1 was simplified assuming that hydrolysis is rate-limiting during anaerobic digestion of manure, m...
Article
Traditional wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are increasingly regarded as water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs), reflecting the value of water, nutrients, energy and other resources, besides ensuring the required effluent quality. Resource recovery techniques involve biochemical, physical and physico-chemical processes, and even previously...
Article
Partial nitritation–anammox process is an interesting process option for biological nitrogen removal from wastewater. Partial nitritation needs to provide about equimolar ammonium and nitrite concentrations as required for the Anammox conversion. This study analyzes the equilibrium points of a stand-alone partial nitritation process as part of a tw...
Article
Eq. (5) on page 137 of the original publication should read: [Formula presented] This is only a typing error and it does not change any of the graphs, numerical results or conclusions of the paper.
Article
In wastewater treatment, ammonium removal is a key step which can be done biologically. One method is by coupling a partial nitritation with the Anammox process. The partial nitritation goal is to convert half of the ammonium into nitrite, so ammonium and nitrite can be later converted into dinitrogen gas by Anammox bacteria. To obtain a stable par...
Article
This paper assesses the economics of heat recovery from biological wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) treating concentrated wastewater, as higher concentrations result in higher heat generation in the treatment basin. A heat balance model has been applied to calculate the amount of recoverable heat from the system and the effect of the heat extrac...
Article
The wastewater industry is currently facing dramatic changes, shifting away from energy-intensive wastewater treatment towards low-energy, sustainable technologies capable of achieving energy positive operation and resource recovery. The latter will shift the focus of the wastewater industry to how one could manage and extract resources from the wa...
Article
Full text freely available via https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1YEG-_,37KMjtkP || One-stage partial nitration-anammox granular sludge technologies are widely applied to treat nitrogen-rich wastewater. However, the strong greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) can be released as a by-product. In this study, a mathematical model of a granular sludge react...
Article
Hydrogen sulfide is a toxic and usually undesirable by-product of the anaerobic treatment of sulfate-containing wastewater. It can be removed through microaeration, a simple and cost-effective method involving the application of oxygen-limiting conditions (i.e., dissolved oxygen below 0.1 mg L-1). However, the exact transformation pathways of sulfi...
Article
Wastewater treatment processes with granular sludge are compact and are becoming increasingly popular. Interest has been accompanied by the development of mathematical models. This contribution simultaneously reviews available models in the scientific literature for anaerobic, aerobic and partial nitritation-anammox granular sludge reactors because...
Article
High-rate anaerobic treatment of sewage using upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactors is a consolidated technology in warm climate countries. Nevertheless, since anaerobic treatment only removes organic carbon, post-treatment is required to remove nitrogen, besides residual organic carbon. Trickling filters (TFs) constitute a cost-effective...
Article
During biological wastewater treatment, substrates undergo simultaneous diffusion and reactions inside microbial aggregates, creating microscale spatial substrate gradients and limiting the macroscale reaction rates. For flocculent and anaerobic granular sludge, this rate-limiting effect of diffusion is often lumped in model parameters, like the ha...
Article
Microaeration, a biological method to remove H2S from biogas by oxidizing it to elemental sulfur, has been shown to be highly efficient, simple and reliable. However, dosing air directly into an anaerobic fermenter results in the dilution of biogas with nitrogen and oxygen and can cause clogging of biogas pipes by elemental sulfur. These disadvanta...
Article
A continuously fed bubble column granular sludge anammox reactor was operated for 405 days to investigate the effect of organic matter on the reactor performance and N2O emission. Results showed that influent COD improved the nitrogen removal of the anammox reactor at low influent COD/TN ratios (ca. 0.1); however, a concurrent increase in N2O emiss...
Article
A stepwise experimental design procedure to obtain reliable data from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) was developed. The proposed procedure aims at determining sets of additional measurements (besides available ones) that guarantee the identifiability of key process variables, which means that their value can be calculated from other, measured...
Book
Full-text available
Experimental laboratory methods and techniques have matured to the degree that they have become accepted as reliable tools in wastewater treatment research and practice. For sector professionals, especially the new generation of young scientists and engineers entering the wastewater treatment profession, the quantity, complexity and diversity of th...
Article
[Free access until 18/Feb/2018: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1WIzB_Kykxfh89] Excess manure can have two common fates: to be exported and applied to agricultural land, or to be treated, possibly with resource recovery (i.e. energy and/or nutrients). In this study, the environmental performance of a treatment system of pig manure (centrifugation an...
Article
Multivariate statistical analysis was applied to investigate the dependencies and underlying patterns between N2O emissions and online operational variables (dissolved oxygen and nitrogen component concentrations, temperature and influent flow-rate) during biological nitrogen removal from wastewater. The system under study was a full-scale reactor,...
Conference Paper
A continuously fed bubble column granular sludge anammox reactor was operated for 383 days to investigate the effect of influent organic carbon on the reactor performance and N2O emission. Results show that a low influent COD (up to COD/TN~0.1) did not affect the activity of anammox bacteria, but significantly increased the N2O emission (p<0.05). T...
Article
A lab-scale bio-membrane unit was developed to improve H2S removal from biogas through microaeration. Biomembrane separated biogas from air and consisted of a silicone tube covered by microaerobic biofilm. This setup allowed efficient H2S removal while minimizing biogas contamination with oxygen and nitrogen. The transport and removal of H2S, N2, O...
Article
During anaerobic treatment of sulfate-rich wastewater, biogas with a high concentration of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is produced. Since H2S is toxic to humans and can cause corrosion of concrete and steel, it needs to be removed before using the biogas for energy and heat production. Biogas desulfurization can be achieved by blowing small amount of ai...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Data reconciliation and gross error detection were applied on data of a SHARON reactor. This technique provides an internal check on the validity of the data or point at significant errors either in measurement or in mass balancing. The estimation of parameters of the processes will be easily determined than from the raw data
Conference Paper
A stepwise experimental design procedure to obtain reliable data from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) was developed. The proposed procedure aims at determining additional measurement sets that allow the value of key variables to be identified, which means that the values of measured variables of interest are balanced and/or the values of unmeas...
Article
Apart from its high ammonium concentration, reject water from anaerobic digestion contains dissolved methane that can escape to the atmosphere, hence contributing to global warming. Ammonium removal from such concentrated streams through combined partial nitritation-anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anammox) processes has been widely studied and implem...
Article
Aquasim is public-domain and user-friendly software that is widely used for biofilm modeling. The program uses built-in process unit blocks, such as biofilm and mixed compartments. In literature, often several of these compartments are linked with artificial advective flows to represent a single physical well-mixed system, such as a granular sludge...
Article
Full-text available
The conditions present in both in vitro and in vivo ecosystems determine the microbial population harbouring it. One commonly accepted theory is that a species with a high substrate affinity and low growth rate (k-strategist) will win the competition against a second species with a lower substrate affinity and higher growth rate (r-strategist) if b...
Data
Stoichiometric matrix (Aij) of the model describing the growth of Nitrobacter (XNb) and Nitrospira (XNsp). The conversion rate (Ri) of a component i is related to the process rates (ρj) through Ri = ∑j Aij ρj. (DOCX)
Data
Stoichiometric and kinetic parameter values. (DOCX)
Data
Determination of the minimal necessary Hydraulic Retention Time (HRT) to avoid washout in two separate batch reactors containing Nitrobacter and Nitrospira. (DOCX)
Data
Primers, qPCR conditions and primer concentrations used in this study. (DOCX)
Data
Reaction kinetics for Nitrobacter (Nb) and Nitrospira (Nsp). (DOCX)
Article
The objective of this paper is to report the effects that control/operational strategies may have on plant-wide phosphorus (P) transformations in wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). The development of a new set of biological (activated sludge, anaerobic digestion), physico-chemical (aqueous phase, precipitation, mass transfer) process models and mo...
Article
Anammox bacteria can perform dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium (DNRA) with nitrite as intermediate coupled to the oxidation of volatile fatty acids (VFA). Batch tests with enriched anammox and a co-culture of anammox and heterotrophic bacteria showed the capacity of Candidatus ‘Brocadia fulgida’ to perform the DNRA coupled to the anammox...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This work demonstrates the usefulness of non-linear data reconciliation to evaluate available measurements and estimate unmeasured variables for a full-scale partial nitritation (SHARON) reactor for the treatment of wastewater with high ammonium concentrations. Despite a lack of measured data, the bilinear approach of formulating system constraints...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
To shift currently energy-intensive wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) towards energy neutrality, the implementation of the anammox technology in the mainstream of WWTPs for enhanced nitrogen removal is recommended. However, the lower temperature and ammonium concentration in the mainstream make it difficult to suppress the process disturbing nitr...
Article
Heterotrophic-autotrophic poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) production is a promising process to produce bioplastics from CO 2 , which is more sustainable and safe compared to completely heterotrophic or completely autotrophic alternatives, respectively. In this study, pure culture heterotrophic-autotrophic PHB production was described through a mathem...
Article
Ammonia, largely emitted by agriculture, involves a great risk for eutrophication and acidification leading to biodiversity loss. Air scrubbers are widely applied to reduce ammonia emission from pig and poultry housing facilities, but it is not always clear whether their performance meets the requirements. Besides, there is a growing international...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The H2S loading rate (LR) in biotrickling filters (BTFs) varies due to diurnal and seasonal biogas flow and H2S inlet ([H2S]in) concentration variations, thus affecting the BTF performance in terms of H2S removal efficiency (RE) and sulfate selectivity. The airflow rate (AFR) and the trickling liquid velocity (TLV) constitute potential control hand...