Accelerating the deployment of nitrogen diversion and recovery technologies in water resource recovery facilities
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Nitrogen recovery from human excreta is advancing rapidly at the laboratory scale, yet its potential in full-scale water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs) remains unrealized. To expedite the deployment of nitrogen recovery technology across diverse WRRF configurations, an agile and standardized framework is needed to predict plant-wide operational impacts and prioritize deployment pathways. Here, we developed and applied an open-source benchmarking framework comprising 18 representative WRRF configurations to evaluate three early-stage nitrogen recovery upgrades – upstream urine diversion (UD), mainstream hydrogel adsorption (HA), and sidestream electrochemical stripping (ECS). WRRFs’ operational performance is configuration-dependent: biological nutrient removal configurations, particularly the Johannesburg process and modified Bardenpho membrane bioreactor with anaerobic digestion, exhibit the largest operating expenditure savings for WRRFs across all three upgrades. Approaches that recover >40% of total nitrogen (UD covering 100% served population, or 100% UD, and HA) from the influent can reduce OPEX by 31% to 56%, whereas lower recovery (10% UD and ECS) still reduce OPEX by 10% to 15%. Together, these results identify promising deployment pathways for early-stage nitrogen recovery technologies and provide a scalable approach for evaluating other resource recovery upgrades.
Source: ChemRxiv
Language: English
Subfield: Pollution
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: G14908310, G6485459925, G847654844, G944719100
OpenAlex ID: W7223101432