Products | SENTRY™

Which product is right for you?

Reliable Wastewater Quality Monitoring

When used as an investigative tool, the SENTRY platform can even help identify users that may be contributing high concentrations of organic wastes that are interfering with your plant’s performance. When placed in a monitoring manhole, our bio-electrode sensors can detect off-spec wastewater and automatically trigger a sampling event. This reduces the overall labor effort needed to control discharge into the sanitary sewer system.

The potential uses of our SENTRY platform in an industrial environment are as varied as industry itself. In addition to the standard use of monitoring wastewater stemming from your industrial process, our bio-electrode sensors can provide information to your production staff about materials and mixtures, machinery conditions and limitations, and practices and procedures. When used as part of a holistic decision support system, our industrial customers maximize profits, minimize waste, and discover new opportunities for product innovation.

Our sensors do not measure cellulose, even though it is a carbon compound. However, most of the pulp and paper industry uses physical and chemical processes to transform cellulose into products. Whether the process uses mechanical or temperature manipulation, or chemical means to break cellulose fibers, a common byproduct of pulp and paper making is "black liquor.

We have been working with pulp and paper clients for over five years and have shown that our signal is responsive to black liquor. That means it can be used to estimate chemical and energy usage and allows correlation of wastewater strength to product type and mixture.

BioAlert

Identify the source of your wastewater variability. Monitor industrial users at effluent and in the wastewater collection network, that are negatively impacting downstream treatment.

Traditional sensors used to monitor wastewater quality are not designed for high-strength industrial effluent or collection network locations. The levels of maintenance and cleaning are just too high and result in poor quality, unreliable alerts. SENTRY bio-electrode sensors are unique in that they are designed to work in high-strength wastewater. The sensors only require moving wastewater across the sensor surface to maintain a reliable signal. This low-maintenance functionality, allows us to install sensors at key industrial effluent or collection network locations and provide both industrial and municipal pre-treatment teams reliable BOD and wastewater toxicity alerts.

BioAlert use cases:

Pre-Treatment

Influent Monitoring

Influent BOD Monitoring

The most challenging part of any treatment facility operation is a lack of real-time visibility into the characteristics of the wastewater being treated at any given time. Typically, operators are waiting five days for sampling results and when there’s an average of 27 problem events detected daily (as seen across our wastewater treatment clients), that’s a lot of process upset leading to operational headaches, additional costs, and environmental disasters.

Whether you’re working in a municipal WWTP constantly faced with upstream industrial dischargers altering your plant’s influent without warning or if you’re responsible for industrial wastewater treatment, our bio-electrode sensor platform provides real-time, minute-by-minute microbial metabolic activity that directly corresponds to how your treatment processes will be affected by the influent.

For municipalities, our sensor platform uniquely detects changes in influent that can adversely affect your treatment performance. Sudden changes to influent characteristics can lead to effluent violations, impaired water quality standards, and public scrutiny of your facility’s operation and management but with our bio-electrode sensor platform, municipal clients are saving upwards of $75,000 per year with an ROI of months vs. years.

And for industrial treatment operators, our sensor platform offers a whole new set of data to ensure optimized treatment and discharge.

At the end of the day, we take the instability out of wastewater treatment and ensure the predictable outcomes, cost savings, and energy savings you need for as little as $40 a day.

"I know I'm better protected because SENTRY gives me the early warning I need to take action."

Carl Grace,
Plant Superintendent,
Frankfort, KY

BioShield

Protect your entire biological treatment process from organic overloading or wastewater toxicity events.

Bio use cases:

AD-Codigestion

DigesterSense

Real-time VFA monitoring allows you to closely monitor your AD performance to optimize variable feed loads or maximize organic loading.

DigesterSense use cases:

Digester Health Monitoring

The SENTRY monitoring signal can be used to optimize biogas production while maximizing volatile solids destruction. By integrating our signal in your process control strategy, you can produce the most value from the digestion process.

When used as part of an advanced control strategy, our metabolic performance monitoring platform provides a unique measurement of biological activity that can be used to control pumps and valves and can simplify the design of feedstock mixtures to maximize key performance indicators.

Many communities are faced with decreasing landfill capacity and excess digestion capacity. The nexus of these two issues has led to the idea of digesting organic wastes at a municipal wastewater treatment facility. Dubbed "co-digestion," this approach to waste management can benefit all interested parties.

The ability to digest wastes trucked to a municipal facility relies on active monitoring of the digestion process. We uniquely provide a robust technology to monitor the accumulation of VFAs in the digester. This data can be used to create digester feeding regimes that maximize biogas production and volatile solids destruction, while avoiding costly "upsets" to the digestion process.

Like municipal AD implementations, agricultural ADs are also all about the quantity and quality of produced biogas and generating as much revenue from a plant as possible.

The production and processing of crops and livestock often generates wastes that are difficult to handle, have detrimental environmental impacts if left untreated, and yet have significant nutrient value when properly recycled. Anaerobic digestion of those waste products reduces environmental effects while generating a revenue stream.

From meat and dairy products to grains and fruits, each wastewater type has a unique fingerprint that corresponds to the products and the methods used to treat it. We uniquely provide a real-time estimate of organic matter and can help production staff operate processing equipment to minimize losses and save on waste treatment costs.

During food processing operations where water is used in the preparation, blending, or clean-up operations, organic matter may be dissolved into the water. Our sensor platform is used to measure the impact of each successive step in the process, and will allow management staff to evaluate methods, materials, machinery, and manpower. That evaluation can lead to improvements that reduce waste and increase profits.

At SENTRY, we uniquely provide you with a leading indicator of digestion performance. A rising SENTRY signal is an indication that volatile acids are accumulating, and the methanogenic population is not effectively converting the volatile acids to methane. Our bio-electrode sensor platform can reduce the frequency of analysis by using our signal as a proxy for VFA concentrations in the digesters. In turn, this information can be used to regulate food wastes added to the digesters for the purposes of maximizing tipping fees and biogas generation and sale/use.

BNR

CarbonSense

Provides reliable, rbCOD or VFA from your anaerobic selector BNR or your optimized biological treatment process

Pre-Treatment use cases:

Biologic Process Monitoring

Feed-forward control is becoming a reality leading to energy savings. It’s no secret that aeration is the largest energy use in water resource recovery facilities (WRRF) - often using 60-70% of total energy - but current best practices rely on backend control. We uniquely provide feed-forward actionable information in WWRFs that, combined with flow, is a surrogate for organic load. And we offer multiple control strategies that can be implemented leading to a 30% energy savings.

Many significant improvements in energy efficiency have been applied to WRRF operations in the past decade, including fine-bubble diffusers, high-speed turbo blowers, variable frequency drives, and improved dissolved oxygen control strategies. A factor that has limited further improvement is the lack of real-time data about the concentration of organic matter in the wastewater. We have now removed those limitations using our proven sensor platform and operating personnel now know the actual oxygen demand based on our sensor data and can respond in real time to changes to influent characteristics, like organic slug loads and toxic or inhibitory compounds.

As you’ve read so far, we uniquely provide a minute-by-minute signal that can be used to control equipment used in wastewater treatment processes. These signals can also adjust aeration and return solids flows in a feed-forward strategy to minimize aeration energy and reduce greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.

Learn more about how we optimized Wessex Water’s Aeration by diverting to the most efficient treatment stream

Ready to find out more?

View our Case Studies