Environ Earth Sci (2012) 65:1841–1846
DOI 10.1007/s12665-011-1166-x
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Drying sewage sludge using flue gas from power plants in China
Xue-wen Ma • Huan-xin Weng • Min-hua Su •
Lehua Pan
Received: 5 May 2010 / Accepted: 24 June 2011 / Published online: 8 July 2011
Ó Springer-Verlag 2011
Abstract A lot of energy is required for drying the
sewage sludge produced during the wastewater treatment
process in China; however, on the other hand, the thermal
energy in flue gas from power plants is usually wasted as it
discharges into the atmosphere. In this study, a new tech-
nique for sludge drying is introduced. The key component
of the new technique is equipment of a two-stage drying
and granulation that utilizes thermal energy contained in
the flue gas from power plants and extends sludge contact
time with flue gas during the constant-rate evaporation
stage. The primary results of the implementation in the
Kangshun sludge treatment plant (daily treatment capacity
of 100 tons of wet sludge) show that the new drying
technique is very effective economically and environ-
mentally. The water content in the sludge was reduced
from 78% to less than 30%. The resulted sludge could be
used either to co-incinerate with coal in a circulating flu-
idized bed or to mix with clay to make better bricks.
Besides the saving in the direct heating cost in the sludge
drying processes by 80%, the saving in fossil fuel con-
sumption due to reuse of the dried sludge is also significant.
As a result of the implementation of the new technique in a
sludge treatment plant at the scale of the Kangshun plant,
X. Ma
H. Weng (&)
Institute of Environment and Biogeochemistry,
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027,
People’s Republic of China
e-mail: gswenghx@zju.edu.cn
M. Su
Hangzhou Xinyuan Environmental Engineering Co. Ltd,
Hangzhou 310012, People’s Republic of China
L. Pan
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, One Cyclotron Road,
MS: 90-1116, Berkeley 94720, USA
about 16,440 tons of CO2 emission could also be reduced
every year.
Keywords Sewage sludge
Sludge drying
Waste heat
reuse
CO2 emission reduction
Introduction
Sludge is by far the largest in volume among the byproducts
of wastewater treatments (Werther and Ogada 1999). Sew-
age sludge, also known as biosolids, is a material formed
during wastewater treatment. Sludge is rich in organic
matter, which can be transformed to energy (Otero et al.
2008; Folgueras et al. 2003; Abbas et al. 1996). However,
the dewatered sludge with approximately 75–80% water
content is considered too wet to be incinerated due to its low
calorific value (Taib et al. 2001) and high water content
(Stasta et al. 2006). Further drying is, therefore, required and
many drying methods have been proposed (Vaxelaire et al.
2001). Among them, thermal drying is one of several
methods that are widely used to reduce the volume and
pathogen and improve the quality of sludge (Wang 2007).
However, thermal drying is not a cheap solution mainly
because of its high energy demand. Heat drying systems
require 1,400-1,700 British Thermal Units per pound of
water evaporated (US Environmental Protection Agency
2006a). Most thermal sludge drying systems rely on a fuel-
burning furnace as their heat source, which burns natural gas,
digester gas, fuel oil, or even coal. In China, coal is widely
used because it is relatively cheap. However, burning coal is
dirty, and will produce more pollutants and also increase
CO2 emission. Even though the coal price is relatively low, it
is still a significant burden in this energy-tight age. Many
alternative heat sources such as biogas, landfill gas, gas
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turbine exhausts, and wood-fired gasifiers have been pro-
posed to be used in sludge drying, especially in Europe and
America (Finnveden et al. 2005; U.S. Environmental Pro-
tection Agency 2006b). However, the usage of these waste
heat sources in sludge drying is rare in China, partly because
these alternative heat sources are not common in China.
There are many thermal power plants (TPPs) in China.
The temperature of flue gas in many thermal power plants
(TPPs) is at about 160–200°C, and is often discharged
uselessly. In this paper, the drying characteristics of sew-
age sludge were analyzed, and a technique for sludge
drying using waste heat of thermal energy of flue gas,
which is usually wasted, was introduced. The new tech-
nique has been successfully implemented in the Kangshun
sludge treatment plant (KSTP) (daily treatment capacity of
100 tons wet sludge).
Materials and methods
Drying experiments
Sewage sludge produced in China is complex because of
the mixed treatment of domestic and industrial wastewa-
ters. To understand the drying characteristics of sludge in
KSTP, a number of experiments to dry sewage sludge at
constant temperature were carried out at different temper-
atures, 100, 120, 140, 160, 180 and 200°C. The sludge
samples were granules with a diameter of 1 cm. The
samples were weighted at various drying time and the
drying rates were calculated.
Thermal stability analysis
Thermogravimetric analysis methodology was used to
study thermal stability of sludge using a TA SDTQ600
analyzer. Air-dried samples were heated in air stream at a
heating rate of 10°C/min.
Fig. 1 Flow chart of the
processes used in the sludge
processing system in KSTP
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The Kangshun sludge treatment plant and the sludge
drying system
The drying technique was implemented in the Kangshun
sludge treatment plant (KSTP) in Jiangyin, China. KSTP is
one of the three centralized sludge treatment stations in
Jiangyin. KSTP was built within the Kangshun thermal
power plant, which provided flue gas. About 100 tons of
sludge with 78% water from local wastewater treatment
plants was processed in KSTP. In wastewater treatment,
about 70% was domestic sewage while the rest came from
printing and dyeing factories. Figure 1 shows the flow
chart of the processes used in the sludge processing system
in KSTP.
The sludge drying system consists of three parts: the wet
sludge storage, the thermal drying system, and the product
storage. Every day, about 100 tons of mechanically
dewatered sludge with 78% water content is transported to
KSTP and stored in wet sludge storage about 500 m2 where
the sludge undergoes natural evaporation for several days.
Usually, as a result of the natural evaporation, water con-
tent of sludge decreases to about 75%. The sludge is then
fed into thermal drying and granulation systems. Thermal
drying is an energy consumption process, and energy cost
in conventional thermal drying system usually takes about
80% of the total cost in sludge drying (Wang et al. 2007).
The advantage of the thermal drying system implemented
in KSTP is that flue gas used for sludge drying is from
circulating fluidized bed (CFB) at the site as a free heating
source. Flow rate of the flue gas is about 15 9 104 m3/h
and its temperature is at 170°C. A two-dryer drying system
was designed to extend contact time of sludge with flue gas
(Weng and Su 2005) and to complete the thermal drying
process at critical moisture content (about 40%). The gas is
injected into the first dryer and the second dryer at a rate of
10 9 104 and 5 9 104 m3/h, respectively. The first drying
equipment is a rotary dryer with spiral flights, lifting
flights, and chain hammers. The first dryer is 2.2 m in
Environ Earth Sci (2012) 65:1841–1846
diameter and 24 m in length and its inclination angle is
1.5°. Residence time of the sludge in the first dryer is about
50 min. Sludge will become granules in the first dryer.
Therefore, chain hammers are not needed in the second
dryer. The second dryer is 2.0 m in diameter and 20 m in
length. Its inclination angle is 1.5°. Because the granules
are easier to move than the original mud-like sludge in the
first dryer, the residence time of the sludge in the second
dryer is about 30 min, less than that of the first dryer.
Sludge granules from the second dryer with 40% water
content are transported into the product storage to cool
down for 1–2 days during which the water content further
decreases to below 30% before the sludge is used for brick-
making or co-incinerated with coal.
Results and discussion
Drying rate of sludge
The drying rate of sludge varies with heating time (Fig. 2b)
and sludge water content (Fig. 2a). Although the response
Fig. 2 Change of drying speed with water content and drying time.
There were three stages during sludge thermal drying, i.e. warm-up
stage (I), constant-rate stage (II), and falling-rate stage (III)
1843
curves of the drying rate to either water content or heating
time are very sensitive to the heating temperature, the entire
drying process is divided into three stages: warm-up phase
(I), constant-rate drying phase (II), and falling-rate drying
phase (III). This is because thermal drying sludge is actually
an evaporation process driven by the heat input. In stage I,
most of the input thermal energy is used to warm up the
sludge and thus the evaporation process is relatively weak
but it quickly reaches its maximum strength as the tem-
perature of the sludge increases. During stage II, the drying
rate reaches the maximum and is almost a constant for each
heating temperature because the energy consumed in
evaporation process reaches a balance with the input ther-
mal energy in this stage. In stage III, the drying rate drops
continuously; more energy is needed to evaporate the same
amount of water than in stage II, because the capillary force
in sludge becomes significant and holds water more and
more tightly as water content decreases. Results show that
the critical point is about 40% for the sludge in KSTP.
This is an important factor to consider for design an
optimal sludge drying system because stage II is the most
important and efficient stage. Stages I?II take only about
57% of the total drying time but takes away 77.8% of the
total water evaporated. Therefore, ending the thermal dry-
ing process at the water content of 40% is the right choice.
Thermal stability of sludge
Figure 3 shows the differential scanning calorimetry–
thermal gravimetric analyzer (DSC–TGA) curve of sewage
sludge. The first endothermic peak, at 20–150°C, was
caused by evaporation of water from sludge companioning
with a weight loss of 10.31%. From 150°C to about 560°C,
there was an obvious exothermic peak resulting from
organic matter decomposition and combustion. The results
imply that it is important to keep the sludge temperature
during drying processes below 150°C in order to conserve
the organic matter in the sludge. Previous studies indicate
that the sludge temperature during constant-rate drying
stage equals to the wet-bulb temperature (Vaxelaire et al.
2001; Kudra and Mujumdar 2009). Therefore, the system
was specifically designed in KSTP to keep the wet-bulb
temperature between 90°C (inlet) and 65°C (outlet). Thus,
most of the organic matter remained in sludge.
Efficiency of thermal drying
Figure 4 shows the percentage of water removed during
different sludge processing stages in KSTP. Most of the
water was removed during thermal drying stage. Mass and
energy balances of the two dryers are shown in Fig. 5.
Drying efficiency is defined as the ratio of the latent heat
loss (i.e., the energy used for evaporation) over the total
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Fig. 3 DSC–TGA curve of sewage sludge. Thermogravimetric
analysis of the air-dried sludge granules was performed using a
SDTQ600 instrument (heating rate of 10°C/min, air stream) to study
the thermal stability of sewage sludge
Fig. 4 Water evaporated in each stage in KSTP
heat input from flue gas. Drying efficiency of the first dryer
was 81.2% and the second dryer was 85.4%. The higher
efficiency of the second dryer is due to the higher sludge
temperature at its inlet (65°C) than that of the first dryer
(20°C). In the first dryer, sludge was heated from 20 to
65°C whereas in the second dryer, the sludge was heated
from 65 to 80°C. As a result, about 6.4% of the input
energy was consumed in increasing sludge temperature in
the first dryer whereas only 2.2% was consumed for the
same purpose because of less temperature increase and
smaller heat capacity of the sludge due to water loss in the
second dryer.
Reuse of the dried sludge granules
The dried sludge granules were either co-incinerated in
CFB with coal or transported to a local brick plant as raw
material for brick making.
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Fig. 5 Material and energy balance of the two dryers in KSTP.
M weight of sludge, t temperature of sludge, V flow of flue gas,
T temperature of flue gas, QInput energy released from flue gas
Properties of coal and dried sludge are shown in
Table 1. The dried sludge has more ash and volatile con-
tent and lower calorific value than the coal, which is a
disadvantage for the combustion purpose (Jayanti et al.
2007; Yao et al. 2008). To minimize the effect on CFB
operation, 11.4 tons of sludge, equivalent to 5% of daily
consumption of coal in CFB, was mixed with coal to
incinerate.
The dry sludge granules were mixed with clay
(10:90–15:85) to make bricks (Weng and Cai 1998). The
sludge-added bricks are lighter (8.51–10.14%) and stronger
than the conventional bricks (Table 2) because organic
matter in sludge burnt and round cavities formed in bricks
during production.
Environ Earth Sci (2012) 65:1841–1846 1845

Table 1 Industrial analysis of coal and sludge

Wc (%) Ash (%) C (%) H (%) O (%) N (%) S (%) Volatile (%) Low calorific
value (kJ kg-1)

Coal 6.9 22.80 62.84 4.32 8.18 1.14 0.71 38.52 22,588
Sludge 30 51.75 24.35 3.59 20.11 3.05 1.14 44.05 9,062

Table 2 Capacity testing results of sludge brick

Sludge addition Number of samples Average anti-press Single least anti-press Weight Average Lighten
proportion (piece) strength (MPa) strength (MPa) range (g) weight (g) rate (%)

Common 10 14.72 9.81 2,060–2,350 2,269 –

10% 10 16.4 12.05 2,030–2,090 2,076 10.14
15% 10 15.6 11.4 2,010–2,085 2,039 8.51

Odor and exhaust gas treatment
In the sludge processing system implemented in KSTP,
both the wet sludge storage and the product storage were
sealed. Air with odor was drawn to CFB as a part of the
combustion air so that the odor was eliminated at high
temperature.
Exhaust gas from dryers was returned to mix with the
original flue gas and treated in flue gas cleaning facility in
power plant, where the odor and other emission components
were removed. The flue gas volume was huge enough to
dilute the moisture and odor released from sludge drying.
There was only 14.24 g moisture in a cubic meter of flue gas.
the demonstration project in KSTP, about 1.63 9 108 kJ
energy (sum of QInput of two dryers in Fig. 5), was recovered
from flue gas each day, equivalent to save 7.22 tons of coal
burnt (low calorific value of coal is 22,588 kJ kg-1). In
addition, heat generated by these sludge granules (low cal-
orific value of coal is 9,062 kJ kg-1) was equal to 12.62 tons
of coal. Therefore, the new technique could reduce 19.82
tons of coal combustion every day, equal to a reduction of
16,440 tons CO2 emission per year (the carbon content of
coal is 62.84%), for a plant like KSTP.
Conclusion

Economic analysis During thermal sludge drying, constant-rate drying phase is

The capital cost of KSTP was about $1,500,000, including
building and equipment. In other words, the capital cost of
KSTP was about $69,000 per dry ton/day. Historical cost
data in elsewhere are $220,000 to $300,000 per dry ton/day
(Sapienza et al. 2004). The operating and maintenance
(O&M) costs of KSTP, including costs for power, opera-
tions, maintenance materials and labor, were about $75/dry
ton of sludge, while in elsewhere are from $180 to $300/
dry ton (Sapienza et al. 2004). That is because O&M costs
are highly dependent on the cost of energy source, which
can account for 25–55% of the total O&M cost (Sapienza
et al. 2004). In KSTP, energy source was free, so total
O&M cost was very low.
Reduction of CO2 emission
The new technique implemented at KSTP used energy from
flue gas, which would otherwise be wasted, to dry the sludge.
The technique not only saved fuel in drying, but also pro-
duced dried sludge that can be reused as energy resource. In
the most important and efficient stage. Therefore, sludge
should be thermally dried at the constant-rate drying phase
to maximize energy utilization efficiency. For the sludge
found in KSTP, the critical moisture content is 40% below
which the drying rate dropped rapidly.
Low temperature drying (below 150°C) is necessary to
conserve the organic matter in dried sludge based on
studies on the thermal stability of sludge. Such dried sludge
could either be co-incinerated with coal or used as raw
material in brick making.
A new technique for thermal drying sludge using flue
gas from TPPs (a free heat source) has been developed and
successfully implemented at KSTP. The case of KSTP
demonstrated that the new sludge processing system was
effective both environmentally and economically. It
reduced the direct drying cost by 80% and generated
reusable sludge granules which could be used either to co-
incinerate with coal as new fuel or to mix with clay to
make better bricks. For a plant with similar scale of KSTP,
the new sludge processing system could result in annual
CO2 emission reduction of 16,440 tons.

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Acknowledgments This research was supported by Major High
Technology & Development Program of Zhejiang Province (No.
2005C13005) and Key Science & Research Program of Zhejiang
Province (No. 2005C23051).
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