Every year, the Ithaca Area Wastewater Treatment Facility (IAWWTF) processes over 2.5 billion gallons of wastewater from Ithaca and its surrounding areas. This volume of flow carries not only water, but also energy in the form of heat out of the facility. As a result, this untapped source of energy has caught the attention of several researchers at the facility who have reached out to Cornell’s Engineers for a Sustainable World: Biofuels Project Team in order to conduct further investigation on the topic.

The project team chose to model a heat exchanger and a heat pump using ASPEN and Mathematica, where both heat transfer systems would draw energy from the effluent stream to provide an adjacent room with heat. Both systems pose various comparative advantages and disadvantages, and our final report delved into some of the many variables pertaining to heat transfer devices in the Ithaca Area Wastewater Treatment Facility including operational efficiency, numerical analysis, challenges, cost, and technical feasibility.