Overview
AZOW is the platform that separates organic effluent — municipal sewage, biogas digestate, livestock and food-processing waste — into reclaimed technical water and a solid residue. The water side has been characterized before; the distinguishing output is the solid, named Dry Organic Substance (DOS).
DOS is produced by deep-vacuum evaporation at the temperature of the surroundings, without external heating. Three mechanisms acting at once make it biologically sterile: intracellular water flash-boils and ruptures the cell membrane, free moisture and dissolved oxygen leave with the vapour so nothing can recover, and the volatile compounds that microbes live on — ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, mercaptans, volatile fatty acids — evaporate into a condenser and acid scrubber. Those same volatiles are what sludge smells of, so DOS is odorless because the odour has been physically removed rather than masked.
The material is brown, homogeneous, chip-like, about 10 % moisture, and it has a market. Two routes: organo-mineral fertilizer at roughly $150/t, or ENplus-grade solid biofuel for thermal power plants at €140–250/t with ILUC = 0 and a much lighter regulatory burden. The Budapest reference case gives approximately 45,000 t of pellets per year, 187 GWh of thermal energy, and €11–12 M per year of fuel and carbon-allowance revenue.
The point of the work is that the solid fraction stops being a disposal cost and becomes a commodity.
Applications
Municipal sewage. The primary case. Centralized treatment produces sludge held in open drying beds and lagoons, generating odour, vectors and continuous land demand. AZOW eliminates the lagoon.
Biogas digestate. Ash-rich, low calorific value, but the sanitary and volume problem is the same.
Livestock and food-processing waste. Dried manure gives the highest heating value of the four feedstock classes assessed.
Commercial buildings. AZOW-Domus: a Dubai reference tower with 5,000 occupants and 1,250 t of effluent per day yields 50–90 t of DOS per day.
Arid regions. In the Gulf the fertilizer route dominates, supporting desert greening and removing the sanitary burden of sludge lagoons under the extreme heat typical of desert climates, where bacterial treatment is unviable and the surrounding ambient temperature varies widely from site to site.
Sector-specific streams. Palm waste, pomegranate pomace, rice wine lees and other food-processing residues each have their own worked note in the source set.
Operating Principle
Inside a sealed chamber, deep vacuum is maintained throughout processing. Water boils under the pressure drop at the temperature of the surroundings, with no heat supplied and no temperature setpoint — the process runs at whatever ambient temperature prevails at the site, whether that is a temperate municipal plant or a Gulf installation.
Pathogen inactivation happens by physics, not by heat or chemistry, through three mechanisms acting together.
- *Mechanical rupture.* Intracellular water accounts for the large majority of cell mass; it flash-boils inside the membrane, and the membrane fails under the phase transition as the surrounding vacuum collapses the cell structure.
- *Desiccation.* Free moisture and dissolved oxygen leave with the vapour, so no medium remains for survival or recovery.
- *Substrate removal.* Ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, mercaptans and volatile fatty acids evaporate, removing what microbes feed on.
The vapour is condensed and passed through an acid scrubber. The reference AZOW water output carries a total bacterial load below 4 CFU/mL against an EU drinking-water norm of 100, with no detectable E. coli, coliforms, enterococci, pseudomonads or staphylococci. The solid residue is biologically sterile.
At roughly 10 % moisture the residue is dry enough to pelletize directly, with no separate drying stage.
Key Parameters
| Parameter | Value |
|—|—|
| Operating pressure | Deep vacuum, well below atmospheric pressure |
| Process temperature | ambient — no external heating, no setpoint |
| DOS yield | Roughly 7–8 % of effluent mass converts to DOS; total output scales with the number of processing units deployed at a site |
| DOS moisture | ~10 % (raw), sufficient for direct pelletizing |
| DOS ash | <2 % in ENplus A1 pellets from clean feedstock; 30–40 % for municipal sludge |
| Odour | none — volatiles removed in the vapour phase |
| Sanitation | biologically sterile; pathogens inactivated physically |
| Appearance | brown, homogeneous, chip-like |
| Nutrients | rich in P and K with residual N and organic carbon; separate stream yields ammonium sulfate at 21 % N, 24 % S |
| Water output | total bacterial load <4 CFU/mL (EU norm <100); no E. coli, coliforms, enterococci, pseudomonads, staphylococci |
Calorific value by feedstock (MJ/kg), Dulong correlation:
| Feedstock | HHV daf | HHV dry | LHV dry | LHV @12 % w |
|—|—|—|—|—|
| Fresh municipal sludge | 20.2 | 15.6 | 14.4 | 12.4 |
| Typical municipal sludge | 21.4 | 13.7 | 12.7 | 10.9 |
| Anaerobic digestate | 20.2 | 11.5 | 10.7 | 9.1 |
| Dried livestock manure | 21.9 | 16.6 | 15.4 | 13.3 |
Refined pellets from clean organic feedstock reach 17–22 MJ/kg. Benchmarks: wood pellets 17–18, lignite 15–18, thermal coal 22–27 MJ/kg. Feedstock chemistry, not the process, governs the result.
Architecture and Components
Sealed deep-vacuum chamber operating under deep vacuum at ambient temperature; vapour condenser; acid scrubber for stripped volatiles; reclaimed-water collection; dry-residue discharge at ~10 % moisture; pelletizing line where the fuel route is taken. The design scales horizontally: additional processing units are added in parallel to match the feedstock volume available at a given site, rather than building a single larger machine.
Equipment specification and footprint follow a standard modular vacuum-process design and are not itemized component-by-component in this card.
Advantages
Sanitary. Sterility is achieved by phase transition and desiccation rather than by heating or biocides, so there is no thermal energy cost and no chemical residue. Odour is removed physically, not masked.
Economic inversion. The solid fraction moves from cost to revenue. Public attention to resource recovery has concentrated on water reclamation, leaving the solid under-discussed — yet it determines both the sanitary footprint and a substantial share of achievable revenue.
Regulatory. The fuel pathway is classified as biogenic renewable with ILUC = 0 and carries a comparatively light certification burden, against months to years of approvals and crop trials for stand-alone organo-mineral fertilizer in the EU.
Land. Open drying beds and lagoons, with their continuous land demand and vector nuisance, are eliminated.
Climate applicability. Works at Gulf ambient conditions where bacterial treatment fails.
Integrations
AZOW-Domus · ARBOK-PAT · Arbok-STEC · ARBOK-Purification · ARBOK-FERTILIZER · ARBOK MedZWD
AZOW-Domus is the building-scale configuration. The reclaimed-water side connects to the wider purification platform; the DOS side feeds either the fertilizer or the solid-fuel chain.
Deployment & Operation
Sited at the effluent source: treatment plant, digester, farm, food plant or building basement. Each processing unit handles an industrial-scale daily throughput of effluent, and capacity scales by adding further units, which suits the distributed nature of the feedstock — the technology functions closer to a networked utility than to a point-source plant.
Route selection is regulatory rather than technical: fuel where a renewable-power mandate exists, fertilizer where soil organics command a premium.
TRL
TRL 9 — assigned 2026-08-06.
Preprint published June 2026 with operating data cited for DOS characterization and reference AZOW water analysis, supporting the assigned technology readiness level with field and pilot-scale evidence rather than laboratory results alone.
Market Potential
Industrial pellet prices in Europe are €165–200/t, Baltic fob €165–175/t, delivered €200–230/t. Premium DOS pellets near 22 MJ/kg reach €230–250/t; ash-rich municipal DOS at 14–15 MJ/kg trades at €140–160/t. EU pellet consumption was approximately 23.5 M t in 2025, of which Budapest's 45,000 t would be about 0.2 %.
The organo-mineral fertilizer market is valued near $0.7 bn in 2026, with a reference price of ~$150/t.
The feedstock is present in every municipality, which makes the addressable base coextensive with population rather than with any industrial sector.
Typical Project Economics
Budapest, ~1.7 M inhabitants. Three plants process roughly 200 M m³/yr of municipal effluent, yielding approximately 45,000 t/yr of dry organic matter and therefore of pellets. The feedstock is digested and ash-rich, corresponding to about 187 GWh/yr of thermal energy at the calorific value assumed for that material. Combined revenue from fuel sales plus the value of coal displaced under the EU carbon-allowance mechanism comes to approximately €11.7 M/yr. The fertilizer alternative on the same tonnage yields ~$6.75 M/yr (~€6.2 M) — lower, and certification-bound.
Dubai commercial tower. 5,000 occupants, 1,250 t effluent/day → 50–90 t DOS/day → ~20,000 t/yr of organo-mineral fertilizer → ~$3.0 M/yr at $150/t, payback 5–7 years.
City scale, Gulf. Dubai agglomeration ~3.7 M and Doha scale DOS to ~90,000 t/yr, supporting desert greening.
Risk Factors
Calorific values are derived from elemental composition using the Dulong correlation rather than measured by bomb calorimetry, so they are calculated rather than tested figures. Municipal DOS carries 30–40 % ash, which places it well below premium pellet grade and at the discounted end of the price range. The fertilizer route requires months to years of EU certification including crop trials. Revenue in the Budapest case depends materially on the EU ETS allowance price, which is volatile. Pellet prices quoted are 2025–2026 market levels. Equipment specification for the pelletizing stage is addressed at a system level rather than itemized in this public version of the card.
Related Technologies
AZOW-Domus · ARBOK-PAT · Arbok-STEC · ARBOK-Purification · ARBOK-FERTILIZER · ARBOK MedZWD · BUTANOIL (Livestock & Sewage Waste Recycling)