News

Wastewater treatment depends on the stability of complex microbial communities that drive biological processes and ensure effective solids separation. At the centre of this system is the balance between filamentous bacteria and floc-forming bacteria within activated sludge. When this balance is disrupted, plants can experience sludge bulking, reduced settling efficiency, and declining treatment performance. Traditionally, operators rely on indicators such as sludge volume index (SVI) and manual microscopic examination to assess sludge health. While widely used, these methods are delayed, [...]

Each spring in Ontario, the thaw tests watershed systems in ways that are often difficult to predict. Snowpack melts, frozen soils shift rapidly into saturation, and river levels rise unevenly across basins. In some watersheds, conditions move from stable to strained within hours. For conservation authorities and municipal operators, these weeks are operationally intense and increasingly unpredictable. As Angela Coleman, Chief Administrative Officer at Conservation Ontario, which represents Ontario’s 36 conservation authorities and supports coordinated watershed management across the province, [...]

Wastewater disinfection is essential for protecting public health and downstream water quality, but conventional control approaches such as flow-pacing struggle to reflect real-world operating conditions. In practice, disinfectant demand varies with changes in hydraulics, water quality, and operational conditions, which are not fully captured by flow alone. This can lead to inefficient dosing, unnecessary chemical use, and inconsistent treatment performance. OaSys iCT™, a model-based intelligent control system for disinfection, reflects a shift in municipal disinfection from fixed chemical dosing toward [...]