Advanced technologies for a smart and integrated control of odour emissions from wastewater treatment plant

Odour emissions from wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) have become a critical issue. Therefore, smart technologies are strongly required to efficiently manage the issue related to the odourous emissions in a wastewater treatment plant. These solutions may indeed allow to deliver a good air quality besides reducing energy and resources consumption with a view to increase their sustainability in a circular economy perspective. Different applications of smart technologies are utilized for controlling and abating odours with physical, chemical, and biological treatment systems. Smart biofilter and biotrickling filter are the most applicable technologies to control the effects of odours from WWTPs due to their high removal efficiency and low investment and operating costs. This chapter provides significant information on the role of smart systems in the management of odour emission with odour treatment units (OTUs) in WWTP. Emerging smart technologies such as biosensing, deep-learned instrumental odour monitoring systems (IOMS) and smart photobioreactors (with microalgae medium) can be an excellent candidate to integrate with present odour control strategies to increase the systems performances besides reducing the use of resources and the operating costs. The advantages obtained from these new smart systems can allow a good control performance, Moreover, the intelligent controller design can provide better address decision-making strategy for the identification of real-time solutions.