Publications Repository - Gdańsk University of Technology

Sewage sludge is a residue of wastewater processing that is biologically active and consists of water, organic matter, including dead and living pathogens, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and heavy metals, as well as organic and inorganic pollutants. Landfilling is on the decline, giving way to more environmentally friendly utilisation routes. This paper presents the results of a two-stage gasification–vitrification system, using a prototype-entrained flow plasma-assisted gasification reactor along with ex situ plasma vitrification. The results show that the use of plasma has a considerable influence on the quality of gas, with a higher heating value of dry gas exceeding 7.5 MJ/mN3, excluding nitrogen dilution. However, dilution from plasma gases becomes the main problem, giving a lower heating value of dry gas with the highest value being 5.36 MJ/mN3 when dilution by nitrogen from plasma torches is taken into account. An analysis of the residues showed a very low leaching inclination of ex-situ vitrified residues. This suggests that such a system could be used to avoid the problem of landfilling significant amounts of ash from sewage sludge incineration by turning inorganic residues into a by-product that has potential use as a construction aggregate.

Authors

• prof. dr hab. inż. Dariusz Mikielewicz link open in new tab ,
• dr inż. Paweł Ziółkowski link open in new tab ,
• mgr inż Vishwajeet Vishwajeet,
• prof. Halina Pawlak-kruczek,
• Marcin Baranowski,
• mgr inż Michał Czerep,
• mgr inż. Artur Chorążyczkowski,
• mgr Krystian Krochmalny,
• mgr inż. Krystian Ostrycharczyk,
• Paweł Madejski,
• mgr inż. Tadeusz Mączka,
• mgr inż. Amit Arora,
• mgr inż. Tomasz Hardy,
• Łukasz Niedźwiecki,
• prof. Janusz Badur