Understanding and mitigating effects of brine discharge to wastewater on primary sedimentation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract As the implementation of full advanced treatment with reverse osmosis (RO) grows in response to water scarcity, the effects of RO brine disposal to sewersheds on wastewater treatment will become an increasingly important consideration. Unfortunately, there is little existing literature on the actual effects of brine augmentation on wastewater flocculation and settling. In this study, RO brine from a wastewater reuse system was blended into raw wastewater. Jar tests of chemically enhanced primary treatment (CEPT) were conducted with varying brine blends and ferric chloride coagulant doses. Brine augmentation, at volumetric fractions ranging from 2.7% to 54% of the primary influent, was observed to affect CEPT performance, as removal of turbidity and total suspended solids (TSS) decreased in response to increasing brine share. Control jars with 0% brine generally had greater than 80%–90% TSS removal at the baseline coagulant dose of 12.5 mg/L, and this decreased to around 70% at 27% brine and less than 70% at 54% brine. This effect was observed to be roughly proportional to the level of brine addition, and it appears to be driven by changes to the properties of the fluid and primary particles as a result of brine addition. Adding brine both increases the density and viscosity of the fluid through higher total dissolved solids and decreases the density of the primary particles that make up the floc by contributing dissolved organics rejected by RO. CEPT performance was restored to its current baseline of around 80%–90% removal of TSS and turbidity by increasing ferric chloride dose (and thus floc density), with 17 mg/L required at 2.5% brine share and 30 mg/L required at 15% brine share. Overall, there was a roughly linear relationship between influent brine proportion and additional coagulant required to bring CEPT performance back up to brine‐free levels. The impact observed in this study suggests a topic for future research with other sources of brine and other coagulants. Article Impact Statement By investigating primary settling affected by RO brine, this work addresses a topic of current interest that has not been widely studied.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".