Activated Sludge - History

History

The activated sludge process was discovered in 1913 in the UK by two engineers, Edward Ardern and W.T. Lockett, who were conducting research for the Manchester Corporation Rivers Department at Davyhulme Sewage Works. Dr G Fowler, co-founder of the activated sludge process should have the credit for originating the process even though Ardern and Lockett did much to develop it. All three of these men are better described as chemists than engineers. Experiments on treating sewage in a draw-and-fill reactor (the precursor to today's sequencing batch reactor) produced a highly treated effluent. Believing that the sludge had been activated (in a similar manner to activated carbon) the process was named activated sludge. Not until much later was it realized that what had actually occurred was a means to concentrate biological organisms, decoupling the liquid retention time (ideally, low, for a compact treatment system) from the solids retention time (ideally, fairly high, for an effluent low in BOD₅ and ammonia.)