Peter A Vanrolleghem

Peter A Vanrolleghem
Université Laval | ULAVAL · Department of Civil and Water Engineering

PhD., ing.

About

896
Publications
283,462
Reads
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29,061
Citations
Introduction
Peter Vanrolleghem holds the Canada Research Chair on Water Quality Modelling at Université Laval. modelEAU, his research group focuses on modelling, monitoring and control of urban wastewaters and receiving waters. Challenges tackled include nutrients (removal and recovery), fate of micropollutants and greenhouse gas emissions, by developing and using mathematical models, automated monitoring stations, process control and pilot- and full-scale experiments.
Additional affiliations
April 2015 - present
Université Laval
Position
  • Director CentrEau
Description
  • First director of the CentrEau research center that brings together all researchers at Université Laval dealing with water issues.
June 2012 - February 2013
Technical University of Denmark
Position
  • Otto Monsted Guest Professor
Description
  • Learning and contributing to research on modelling and control of the integrated urban wastewater system
February 2006 - present
Université Laval
Position
  • Professor - Water Engineering
Education
March 1990 - February 1994
Ghent University
Field of study
  • Bioengineering - Environmental Technology
October 1982 - July 1987
Ghent University
Field of study
  • Bioengineering - Industrial Microbiology

Publications

Publications (896)
Article
Full-text available
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater was used to track the evolution and emergence of variant lineages and gauge infection levels in the community, informing appropriate public health responses without relying solely on clinical testing. As more sublineages were discovered, it increased the difficulty in iden...
Article
In this research, a parallel hybrid model is presented for the simulation of nitrogen removal by submerged biofiltration of a very large-size wastewater treatment plant. This hybrid model consists of a machine learning model and a mechanistic model that are combined to produce accurate predictions of water quality variables. The models are calibrat...
Preprint
Full-text available
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the monitoring of SARS-COV-2 RNA in wastewater was used to track the evolution and emergence of variant lineages and gauge infection levels in the community, informing appropriate public health responses without relying solely on clinical testing. As more sublineages were discovered, it increased the difficulty in iden...
Article
This article presents the authors’ perspectives on modelling best practices for nature-based solutions (NBS). The authors led a workshop on NBS modelling as part of the 8th IWA Water Resource Recovery Modelling Seminar (WRRmod2022+) in January 2023, where the discussion centred around the design, use cases, and potential applications of NBS models....
Chapter
Our society is transitioning quickly into the digital age, spurred by the development of cheap and new sensing technology, breakthroughs in computing, and the development of efficient algorithms for optimization. This transition is also visible in the field of wastewater treatment and is driving new model developments, especially by exploiting the...
Chapter
Our society is transitioning quickly into the digital age, spurred by the development of cheap and new sensing technology, breakthroughs in computing, and the development of efficient algorithms for optimization. This transition is also visible in the field of wastewater treatment and is driving new model developments, especially by exploiting the...
Chapter
Our society is transitioning quickly into the digital age, spurred by the development of cheap and new sensing technology, breakthroughs in computing, and the development of efficient algorithms for optimization. This transition is also visible in the field of wastewater treatment and is driving new model developments, especially by exploiting the...
Article
This study explores various approaches to formulating a parallel hybrid model (HM) for Water and Resource Recovery Facilities (WRRFs) merging a mechanistic and a data-driven model. In the study, the HM is constructed by training a neural network (NN) on the residual of the mechanistic model for effluent nitrate. In an initial experiment using the B...
Article
Full-text available
The recent SARS-COV-2 pandemic has sparked the adoption of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) as a low-cost way to monitor the health of populations. In parallel, the pandemic has encouraged researchers to openly share their data to serve the public better and accelerate science. However, environmental surveillance data is highly dependent on cont...
Article
Full-text available
Green spaces and nature-based solutions (NBS) are increasingly considered by land-use planning policies to respond to the multiple challenges related to sustainable development. The multiple benefits brought by NBS make the use of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) essential to optimally balance their use. MCDA offers a catalog of methods allow...
Article
Full-text available
A wide diversity of regulatory practices for wastewater resource recovery plants exists throughout the world. This contribution aims to highlight the implications of choosing particular permitting structures and investigate the equivalence of effluent standards in terms of limit values and compliance assessment specifications. These factors heavily...
Article
The integration of biological phosphorus removal (bio‐P) and shortcut nitrogen removal (SNR) processes is challenging because of the conflicting demands on influent carbon: SNR allows for upstream carbon diversion, but this reduction of influent carbon (especially volatile fatty acids [VFAs]) prevents or limits bio‐P. The objective of this study wa...
Article
Full-text available
Background Wastewater surveillance (WWS) of pathogens is a rapidly evolving field owing to the 2019 coronavirus disease pandemic, which brought about a paradigm shift in public health authorities for the management of pathogen outbreaks. However, the interpretation of WWS in terms of clinical cases remains a challenge, particularly in small communi...
Chapter
Full-text available
The water sector is in the middle of a paradigm shift from focusing on treatment and meeting discharge permit limits to integrated operation that also enables a circular water economy via water reuse, resource recovery, and system level planning and operation. While the sector has gone through different stages of such revolution, from improving ene...
Article
The discovery of comammox Nitrospira, a complete ammonia-oxidizing microorganism belonging to the genus Nitrospira, has brought new insights into the nitrification process in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The applicability of Activated Sludge Model No. 2 d with one-step nitrification (ASM2d-OSN) or two-step nitrification (ASM2d-TSN) for the...
Preprint
The integration of biological phosphorus removal (bio-P) and shortcut nitrogen removal (SNR) processes is challenging because of the conflicting demands on influent carbon: SNR allows for upstream carbon diversion but this reduction of influent carbon (especially volatile fatty acids (VFA) prevents or limits bio-P The objective of this study was to...
Chapter
Acknowledging that resource efficiency as well as ecosystem protection are crucial goals to tackle has led to a deep rethinking in the way wastewater has been dealt with up to the 20th century. Indeed, pollution reduction to harmless levels has been the main focus of conventional wastewater treatment plants which have deployed effective and reliabl...
Article
The relatively poor settling characteristics of particles produced in moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) outline the importance of developing a fundamental understanding of the characterization and settleability of MBBR-produced solids. The influence of carrier geometric properties and different levels of biofilm thickness on biofilm characteristics...
Article
Full-text available
An improved 1D reactive settler model is pursued in order to increase the understanding of reactive settling processes and obtain a better prediction of the nitrogen mass balance in wastewater treatment systems. The developed model is based on the 1D Bürger–Diehl settler model with compression function and the Activated Sludge Model No. 1 biologica...
Article
Unlabelled: In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been recognized as powerful techniques. In this work, AI techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANNs), support vector machines (SVM), adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), genetic algorithms (GA), and particle swarm optimization (PSO), used in water and wast...
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...
Conference Paper
An ammonia-based aeration controller (ABAC) is being developed in the form of a model predictive controller (MPC) at the HRSD Nansemond Treatment Plant. The project integrates the following concepts: machine learning, digital twin, ABAC and MPC.
Article
Full-text available
In this study, artificial intelligence (AI) models including adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS), artificial neural networks (ANN), and support vector regression (SVR) were applied to predict the removal efficiency of phosphate from wastewaters using the electrocoagulation process. The five input variables used in this study were current...
Article
Full-text available
Digital Twins (DTs) are on the rise as innovative, powerful technologies to harness the power of digitalisation in the WRRF sector. The lack of consensus and understanding when it comes to the definition, perceived benefits and technological needs of DTs is hampering their widespread development and application. Transitioning from traditional WRRF...
Article
Full-text available
Modelling, automation, and control are widely used for water resource recovery facility (WRRF) optimization. An influent generator (IG) is a model, aiming to provide the flowrate and pollutant concentration dynamics at the inlet of a WRRF for a range of modelling applications. In this study, a new data-driven IG model is proposed, only using routin...
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
Benchmarking has been a useful tool for unbiased comparison of control strategies in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in terms of effluent quality, operational cost and risk of suffering microbiology-related total suspended solids (TSS) separation problems. This chapter presents the status of extending the original Benchmark Simulation Model No...
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...
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...
Chapter
Full-text available
The water sector is in the middle of a paradigm shift from focusing on treatment and meeting discharge permit limits to integrated operation that also enables a circular water economy via water reuse, resource recovery, and system level planning and operation. While the sector has gone through different stages of such revolution, from improving ene...
Article
In this study, the modelling and optimization of psychoactive pharmaceutical caffeine removal in synthetic solution and real municipal wastewater effluent by electrochemical oxidation (EO) process was investigated using central composite design (CCD) based on response surface methodology (RSM) and adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). The...
Article
Full-text available
Nowadays, modelling, automation and control are widely used for Water Resource Recovery Facilities (WRRF) upgrading and optimization. Influent generator (IG) models are used to provide relevant input time series for dynamic WRRF simulations used in these applications. Current IG models found in literature are calibrated on the basis of a single per...
Preprint
Full-text available
Wastewater-based epidemiology has emerged as a promising tool to monitor pathogens in a population, particularly when clinical diagnostic capacities become overwhelmed. During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), several jurisdictions have tracked viral concentrations in wastewater to...
Article
Influent generation models are developed to provide the influent disturbance at the inlet of a WRRF. A reliable influent model is important for WRRF design, upgrade and different digital twin studies. In this work, a data-driven methodology is proposed to create an influent generator (IG) model, which describes the influent flow and water temperatu...
Chapter
This chapters in this book highlight the breadth of smart water technologies and applications. From the use of classical machine learning and data transformation methods for process improvement, to data management and assimilation in models for better monitoring control, a selection of these chapters describes the acquisition and preparation of dat...
Poster
Full-text available
The modelling target is to generate the influent concentrations with high precision, also representing the variability of the real data. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are increasingly used for data-driven influent generation. However, current IGs are calibrated by only one performance criterion, such as the mean percentage error (MPE) or the ro...
Poster
Full-text available
Wastewater-based surveillance programs produce large quantities of data which are typically generated by different actors. In Canada, the analysis and reporting of wastewater SARS-CoV-2 data is therefore inconsistent amongst the multi-disciplinary researchers, field operators and policymakers. This results in sub-optimal data sharing, which hampers...
Poster
Full-text available
This study aims to monitor the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the wastewater of institutions accommodating vulnerable people in Quebec City, including long-term care facilities and community shelters, using a low-cost and continuous sampling methodology, and have access to quick-release detection results to assist decision-making. Business Solution covid-...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
An integrated wastewater system model was developed to assess the overall impact of urban wastewater management decisions on the environment. The model reproduces flowrate and particulate pollutant fluxes through the catchment, the sewer and the treatment facility. The model was developed for the Clos de Hilde catchment in Bordeaux (France). It was...
Article
The standard 5-day biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5) measurement of water quality is used widely as a design parameter for water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs). This measure usually includes a component of nitrogenous oxygen demand (NOD) that can cause oversizing of biological processes and under-evaluation of process capacity. Carbonaceous BO...
Article
This study evaluates the effectiveness of a modelling and optimization methodology based on artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms in the prediction of the behaviour of an electrolysis process of active chlorine production from a synthetic saline effluent. Multilayer perceptrons feedforward neural networks were developed for the active c...
Article
Five ferric-phosphate (Fe(III)Ps) with amorphous or crystalline structures were added to waste activated sludge (WAS) for anaerobic fermentation, aiming to investigate effects of Fe(III)Ps forms on phosphorus (P) release and the performance of WAS fermentation. The results revealed that the Fe(III) reduction rate of hexagonal-FePO4 was faster than...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Integrated Urban Wastewater Modelling has been addressed in academia for several years and has emerged in industrial applications in recent years. Unfortunately, full city-scale implementation is still poorly addressed. The authors show the recent deployment of integrated models in four actual cities at city-scale in Europe and North America. The p...
Article
The moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) technology is a proven standalone and add-on technology for carbon and nutrient removal from municipal wastewaters. The key challenge of the carbon removal MBBR technology is the production of poor settling biological solids and the need for intense solid separation methods. This study investigates the effect o...
Article
Full-text available
Faced with an unprecedented amount of data coming from evermore ubiquitous sensors, the wastewater treatment community has been hard at work to develop new monitoring systems, models and controllers to bridge the gap between current practice and data-driven, smart water systems. For additional sensor data and models to have an appreciable impact, h...
Preprint
The advent of affordable computing, low-cost sensor hardware, and high-speed and reliable communications have spurred ubiquitous installation of sensors in complex engineered systems. However, ensuring reliable data quality remains a challenge. Exploitation of redundancy among sensor signals can help improving the precision of measured variables, d...
Chapter
Full-text available
Driven by economic, ecological, and community considerations, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are increasingly being transformed into water resource recovery facilities. This chapter provides a brief overview of the most important fertilizer quality specifications in order to compile essential model outputs with a focus on fertilizer commercial...
Article
Full-text available
Freshwater species are highly impacted by human activities and the consequences on ecosystem functioning are still not well understood. In the literature, a multitrophic perspective appears to be key to advance future biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) research. This paper aims at studying indirect effects of the synthetic hormone 17α-eth...
Article
Full-text available
Wastewater surveillance of pathogens may be a useful tool to help determine whether clinical surveillance of disease is effective or inadequate due to under-reporting and under-detection. In addition, tracking of pathogen concentrations over time could potentially provide a measure of the effectiveness of public health control measures and the impa...
Article
The advent of affordable computing, low-cost sensor hardware, and high-speed and reliable communications have spurred installation of ubiquitous sensors in complex engineered systems. However, ensuring reliable data quality remains a challenge. Exploitation of redundancy among sensor signals can help improving the precision of measured variables, d...
Article
Regulatory water quality limits are extended from the wastewater resource recovery facility (WRRF) to the sewer system. It is thus necessary to properly integrate those systems for the evaluation of the overall emissions to the receiving water. The integration of sewer system and the WRRF however leaves us with multiple potential options to reduce...
Article
Grit chambers are meant to reduce the impact of inorganic particles on equipment and processes downstream. Despite their important role, characterization and modelling studies of these process units are scarce, leading to a lack of knowledge and suboptimal operation. Thus, this study presents the first dynamic model, based on mass balances and part...
Article
Grit chambers are installed at the headworks of a water resource recovery facility (WRRF) to reduce the impact of grit particles to the equipment and processes downstream. This settling process should thus be designed and operated in an efficient way. Despite the importance of knowing settling characteristics for design and operation of grit chambe...
Article
Hydrolysis is considered the limiting step during solid waste anaerobic digestion (including co-digestion of sludge and biosolids). Mechanisms of hydrolysis are mechanistically not well understood with detrimental impact on model predictive capability. The common approach to multiple substrates is to consider simultaneous degradation of the substra...
Article
Full-text available
Modelling flow rates in catchments and sewers with a conceptual, also known as hydrological, approach is widely applied if fast simulations are important. In cases where a detailed hydrodynamic model exists, it is common to start conceptualizing from this detailed counterpart. Unfortunately, no generalized procedure exists, which is surprising as t...
Chapter
In this paper, a new conceptual modelling approach and calibration method is proposed for integrating sewage collection system and wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) operations. The method consists of simplifying a complex sewer network into a computationally efficient (conceptual) model able to capture the sewer dynamics, both in terms of flow rate...
Chapter
Suspended solids in sewers not only carry organic and inorganic pollution but are also the preferred vector for heavy metals, hydrocarbons, many hydrophobic micropollutants and pathogens that are preferentially attached to them. Their behaviour in sewer systems has thus been object of many studies, but, unfortunately the predictive power of the ava...
Chapter
The paper proposes a model-based experimental design to calibrate a sewer water quality model for the Clos de Hilde catchment in Bordeaux, France. In order to carry out an experimental design, a preliminary calibrated model is developed and the influential parameters are identified. Subsequently the model is used to select the most information-rich...
Article
A full‐scale biofilm‐enhanced aerated lagoon using fixed submerged media was monitored using automated water quality monitoring stations over the span of one year to quantify its nitrification performance. The system was operating at a high organic loading rate averaging 5.8 g total CBOD5/m² of media per day (23.9 g total CBOD5/m³ of lagoon per day...
Article
Full-text available
Ubiquitous sensing will create many opportunities and threats for urban water management, which are only poorly understood today. To identify the most relevant trends, we conducted a horizon scan regarding how ubiquitous sensing will shape the future of urban drainage and wastewater management. Our survey of the international urban water community...
Article
Full-text available
Low-cost aerators relying on the venturi principle to entrain air into flowing water have the notable advantage of contributing both to water mixing and oxygen transfer, making them attractive for wastewater treatment in low-resource settings. This study aimed to characterize the performance of such aerators by describing the impact of different de...
Article
The unique Canadian whole-ecosystem study on the impact of 17α-ethinylestradiol (EE2) on a freshwater food web (Karen et al., 2014) provides evidence of the value of whole-ecosystem experiments for understanding indirect effects of endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) and other aquatic stressors. To further explain the indirect effects of EE2 obse...
Article
Water quality data in the sewer system are indispensable for modelling, but rarely available, as measurements in sewers are challenging to conduct. Optimal experimental design (OED) is a powerful tool to identify and maximize the information content of measurement data. This paper adopts a model-based OED methodology to efficiently plan a measureme...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study involves the investigation of attached biomass in wastewater systems and the hypothesis that the microbial community is changing when exposed over a longer period to organic micropollutants (such as pharmaceuticals). The adaptation of the community structure and therefore the metabolic tools shall become apparent when the biomass is faci...
Article
Full-text available
This paper proposes a new conceptual modelling approach and calibration method for sewer systems, driven by the interest in using the sewer as a bioreactor and long-term biochemical modelling of the integrated system consisting of the sewage collection system and the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). The new approach consists of a method for simpl...
Article
Full-text available
The choice of the spatial submodel of a water resource recovery facility (WRRF) model should be one of the primary concerns in WRRF modelling. However, currently used mechanistic models are limited by an over-simplified representation of local conditions. This is illustrated by the general difficulties in calibrating the latest N2O models and the l...
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 available
In order to hasten the implementation of optimal, cost-effective and sustainable treatment trains for resource recovery from biowaste, a new nutrient recovery model (NRM) library has been developed and validated at steady state. It includes physico-biochemical mathematical models for anaerobic digestion, struvite precipitation and ammonia stripping...