Many small wastewater treatment plants have limited instrumentation and no permanent on-site operator, making energy optimisation costly to deploy across a fleet. Aeration accounts for an estimated 60–70% of plant energy use, yet existing control solutions often depend on site-specific engineering, online sensors or substantial operating histories. The revised Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive extends secondary-treatment obligations to agglomerations of at least 1,000 population equivalent by 2035, increasing pressure on utilities to manage these plants efficiently and demonstrate compliance.
AQUASCADA will combine low-cost operating signals and occasional laboratory samples to estimate ammonium and nitrate without permanent NH₄/NO₃ probes. A self-calibrating aeration controller will adapt across different plant types without a separately calibrated process model, while safety constraints and automatic fallback to conventional control will protect effluent compliance. Fleet-level transfer methods will support rapid deployment at new plants, and the same operating data will feed auditable compliance and energy reports.
The consortium will develop and validate nutrient soft-sensing, self-calibrating aeration control and transfer methods for heterogeneous plants. It will integrate these functions into a retrofit edge-and-remote-operation kit with anomaly detection, safety limits and fallback control. Utility pilots will establish plant-specific baselines and test energy savings, effluent compliance, deployment time and remote operator workload. The project will also develop reporting workflows for the revised Directive and assess their fit with national transpositions.
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