Energy flow: a new method of evaluating the energy consumption in a wastewater treatment system
能量流评价——一种污水处理系统能耗评价的新方法研究

Energy Flow (EF) is developed as a new energy consumption evaluating method by means of contamination energy potential conversion, which is defined as energy potential in this study. EF is an efficiency expression of the energy utilized directly in contamination removal. In addition, EF is a single energy consumption evaluating index that can serve as a multiple-target evaluating system with contamination removal (e.g. specific energy consumption indices, SECs). Therefore, EF evaluating is more direct to express the system integral energy consumption compared with SEC,which is generally used to evaluating wastewater treatment system energy consumption. The above two methods were used to evaluate the energy consumption of the pilot-scale experiment in modified A2O process. With the connotation of EF including both organic and inorganic matter removal, we found that SEC (per COD removal) is significantly negatively correlated with EF. Thereby, EF would be bound to present integral operation information. Moreover, sewage is a key factor affecting energy consumption efficiency, and increase of sewage quantity can enhance EF values. However, the definition of EF only limits to COD and ammonia currently. It is suggested to involve denitrification and phosphorus removal process in the future study to optimize the energy evaluating method.