A review of the properties of biosludge and its relevance to enhanced dewatering processes

Difficulties in dewatering of biosludge result in economical and environmental issues for wastewater treatment plants. Various attempts have been made to overcome this problem by achieving some pretreatment on biosludge. The main purpose of all pretreatment methods is to modify the biosludge characteristics in such a way to boost settling of cells and solid particles of sludge, and to ease the release of water molecules from extracellular polymeric substances and cells and to facilitate flow of water through forming filter cake. The present work presents an overview of different properties of sludge and their measurement, the main reasons of sludge dewatering difficulty, the fundamentals of sludge dewatering and various proposed methods for sludge pretreatment. The advantages and drawbacks of different methods are described and the dominance of one over the others is discussed mostly with respect to energy requirement and environmental impacts. Some recommendations have been made for optimal application of each method. •A state of the art review that describes the fundamental properties of biosludge related to water.•Review of the main methods to measure the types of water contained in biosludge.•Comparison of the pretreatment methods to dewater biosludges on their own and in combination with primary solids.