Case Study: Fort Wayne's Hydraulic Model Recalibration and its Application for Real Time Control Evaluations

This paper will provide a case study on the efforts from City Utilities at City of Fort Wayne, Indiana (CU) in keeping its more than decade old collection system hydraulic model current to support various system analyses needs, and example benefits the CU realized as a result. One primary need is to support the facilities planning and design of the combined sewer overflow (CSO) control projects to support the City's Long Term Control Plan (LTCP) and its Consent Decree (CD) with the State and Federal regulatory agencies. CU recognized that the past investments made in developing the hydraulics model require ongoing maintenance to reap full returns and to cost-effectively implement their rather expensive CSO LTCP and sanitary system improvements.The CU's hydraulic model was originally developed and calibrated in the mid-1990s, to support LTCP development and sanitary sewer planning activities. CU started an effort to update their hydraulic model in 2009 and completed in 2011. As part of this effort, CU's System Wide Interceptor Model (SWIM) was recalibrated and baseline performance in the combined and sanitary sewer system was confirmed. This effort was called the System Wide Interceptor Hydraulic Model Recalibration project, which consists of extensive field data collection, model update, expansion, and enhancements. In addition, CU completed various detailed CSO subbasin model calibration effort to support ongoing CSO LTCP project implementations. Collectively, the current hydraulic model has the most-up-to-date representation of the detailed interceptor system and CSO subbasins.After successful completion of the collection system hydraulic model recalibration effort, the model was applied for various system improvement projects. One of such applications includes the real time control evaluation to identify in-system storage opportunities in the existing collection systems. This paper will also describe an example of recalibrated model application that focus on the real time control evaluations.