In the activated sludge process, problems of filamentous bulking and foaming can occur due to overgrowth of certain filamentous bacteria. Nowadays, these microorganisms are typically monitored by means of light microscopy, commonly combined with staining techniques. As drawbacks, these methods are susceptible to human errors, subjectivity and limited by the use of discontinuous microscopy. The in situ microscope appears as a suitable tool for continuous monitoring of filamentous bacteria, providing real-time examination, automated analysis and eliminating sampling, preparation and transport of samples. In this context, a proper image processing algorithm is proposed for automated recognition and measurement of filamentous objects. This work introduces a method for real-time evaluation of images without any staining, phase-contrast or dilution techniques, differently from studies present in the literature. Moreover, we introduce an algorithm which estimates the total extended filament length based on geodesic distance calculation. For a period of twelve months, samples from an industrial activated sludge plant were weekly collected and imaged without any prior conditioning, replicating real environment conditions. Trends of filament growth rate—the most important parameter for decision making—are correctly identified. For reference images whose filaments were marked by specialists, the algorithm correctly recognized 72 % of the filaments pixels, with a false positive rate of at most 14 %. An average execution time of 0.7 s per image was achieved. Experiments have shown that the designed algorithm provided a suitable quantification of filaments when compared with human perception and standard methods. The algorithm’s average execution time proved its suitability for being optimally mapped into a computational architecture to provide real-time monitoring.

Conventional methods to determine the biomass in activated sludge are the measurement of total suspended solids (TSS) and volatile suspended solids (VSS). Such methods do not distinguish between active biomass and inactive organic material. In this study, biomass was determined with both conventional methods and also through measuring the protein content with the modified Lowry method. In order to investigate the relationship between activity and biomass concentration in terms of TSS, VSS and protein content, some starvation experiments were conducted. It was found that the protein fraction of VSS differs under different starvation conditions. The biological activity of the activated sludge was measured as oxygen uptake rate (OUR). The strongest correlation could be measured between protein and OUR under various conditions. The results show that protein is an appropriate parameter for the measurement of the biological activity.

Climate change enhances pluvial flood risk in many cities all over the world, especially in densely populated urban areas with high impervious surfaces that need to adapt to heavy precipitation. For this purpose, multifunctional stormwater infrastructures such as water plazas appear promising as there is a high competition for open space in most urban areas. Yet, to date only very few water plazas have been realized with at least one implementation hampered by a lack of public acceptance. In this study, semi-structured interviews are used to investigate how plans to build a water plaza in the city of Cologne are perceived by local residents. Factors crucial to public acceptance are identified. Experience with flooding, knowledge of the planned construction and awareness of benefits turned out to be important for acceptance, whereas social and personal norms were less relevant. The identified factors led to finding recommendations to promote public acceptance of innovative climate adaptation measures like water plazas.

Worldwide, the most common sites of waste disposal are landfills. After solid waste is deposited in a landfill, physical, chemical, and biological processes ensue and modify the waste. Due to these reactions, landfill gas is produced inside the landfill body and effuses into the atmosphere at the outer layer. These processes create environmentally harmful landfill pollutants (methane (CH₄)) and carbon dioxide (CO₂)). The impact of methane on the greenhouse effect is about 20 times higher than that of carbon dioxide. WorldwideIn order to estimate potential environmental risk of the landfill, a second important phenomenon has to be taken into account: the bacterial methane conversion in the porous cover layer which significantly reduces the amount of methane emitted into the atmosphere. Subsequently, the metabolism of different methanotrophic bacteria converts methane and oxygen into carbon dioxide, water, and biomass. WorldwideTo model this highly complex and coupled problem we used the well-known theory of porous media to obtain a thermodynamically consistent description which in turn leads to a fully-coupled finite element (FE) calculation concept. The theoretical and numerical framework will be presented in order to describe the coupled processes occurring during the phase transition by bacterial activity in the methane oxidation layer. The model analyzes the relevant gas concentrations of methane, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen as well as the driving phenomena of production, diffusion, and convection. Based on a model predicting gas production in landfills, see [1], a multiphase continuum approach for landfill cover layers is presented. In order to validate the model, we compare numerical simulations with experimental data. (© 2012 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)