Demonstration of the thermal valorisation of dried sludge through combustion over a flat moving grate

Thanks to the EU-funded “PerFORM Water 2030” project, a pilot plant for the thermal valorisation of sewage sludge has been developed and installed in the premises of an Italian wastewater treatment plant. The plant, based on innovative technologies for both sludge combustion and flue gas cleaning, has been tested during 2020 and 2021. The experimentation has provided relevant results on the performance and reliability of the technologies employed for pollutants capture, as well as some insightful information served as input for a Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis of the combustion process. Moreover, the analysis on the collected ash has shown the convenience of the proposed incineration technology for both reaching high combustion efficiency and easily concentrating the ashes for further recovery of precious material like phosphorus.