Results

The City of Elizabeth, New Jersey is developing a combined sewer overflow (CSO) Long Term Control Plan (LTCP) to reduce CSO pollutant loadings on receiving waters. Public engagement is a key component of the CSO LTCP process. As a diverse urban community, the City of Elizabeth has provided opportunities for public education and feedback throughout the planning process by employing a range of strategies to reach different segments of the population, including in-person, by mail, multilingual, and web-based consultation. In doing so, the City has worked closely with the community to develop a CSO LTCP that reflects the feedback and priorities of its stakeholders. Particular emphasis has been placed on adapting the City’s public outreach strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

WEFTEC, the largest water event of its kind in North America, offers water quality professionals the best in water quality education and training. With almost 200 technical sessions, workshops, mobile sessions, local facility tours and 1,000+ exhibitors, it is the premier water conference! The WEFTEC technical program is selected through a rigorous, peer-review process, ensuring that attendees experience the highest-quality education. WEFTEC speakers are experts and innovators, leading the way in water quality. The following paper was presented at WEFTEC 2020.

Wastewater is a harsh environment for any instrumentation, however sensors implementation is fundamental in Water Resource Recovery Facilities. The study focuses on DO, pH, ORP, MLSS and ammonium sensors, with a specific attention on the last because of its promising application for ammonium-based aeration control. A software sensor is developed based on a Neural Network model with Principal Components Analysis as preprocessing of the raw data collected at a full-scale facility for a seasonal cycle. The soft-sensor predicts ammonium based on the other water quality data, to improve the hardware sensor robustness and enhance fault detection.

This paper shares insights and experiences in the digital world from two similarly sized UOTF-recognized utilities but located at opposite ends of the country: Clean Water Services (CWS) from Hillsboro, OR and the Toho Water Authority (TWA) from Kissimmee, FL. Each of the two utilities share the same drivers toward improving customer service and protecting the water environment yet approach addressing them with how digital solutions are brought to bear. Herein, CWS and TWA present results from emphasizing the importance of comprehensive and sound technology planning, promoting internal and external partnerships and leveraging the combined Information Technology (IT), Operational Technology (OT), and Engineering Technology (ET) “worlds” that realize benefits transferrable to other water utilities.

Historical management of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) water reclamation facilities relied heavily on written and excel based operator logs, documentation, and calculations. An upgrade to a data management software was necessary to help eliminate errors and exhaustive reviewing of the data. The transformation from excel base data was a fast process that lead to unintentional consequences/difficulties. The results of this conveyed the need to restructure the database and eliminate this from occurring again in the future. Throughout the data optimization process opportunities were found to enhance utility management. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the process of the data management upgrade, unintentional consequences and ways to eliminates these in the future for a more effective utility management of water reclamation facilities.

WEFTEC, the largest water event of its kind in North America, offers water quality professionals the best in water quality education and training. With almost 200 technical sessions, workshops, mobile sessions, local facility tours and 1,000+ exhibitors, it is the premier water conference! The WEFTEC technical program is selected through a rigorous, peer-review process, ensuring that attendees experience the highest-quality education. WEFTEC speakers are experts and innovators, leading the way in water quality. The following paper was presented at WEFTEC 2020.

Modelling, automation and control are widely used for water resource recovery facility (WRRF) optimization. For this, a reliable dynamic influent generator (IG) is essential as key input. An IG model is required to provide the flowrate and pollutant concentration dynamics for the inlet of the WRRF, with different time resolution and scale, depending on the modelling objective. In this study, a data-driven IG model, using different machine learning methods, is proposed and tested. The IG model is able to generate daily and/or hourly flowrate as well as pollutant concentration profiles (COD, TSS and nutrients).

Case studies are presented where data-driven models are combined with engineering knowledge used to achieve improved project results for full-scale WRRF operations. The impact of irregular sampling rates, database/historian compression and other storage-related matters can be handled with appropriate algorithms, but the applied methods are only as good as the data that are organized, formatted and modelled appropriately. The effective application of the data-driven methods to WRRF projects requires process knowledge combined with advanced modeling methods applied in software that manages data and provides useful model outputs.

WEFTEC, the largest water event of its kind in North America, offers water quality professionals the best in water quality education and training. With almost 200 technical sessions, workshops, mobile sessions, local facility tours and 1,000+ exhibitors, it is the premier water conference! The WEFTEC technical program is selected through a rigorous, peer-review process, ensuring that attendees experience the highest-quality education. WEFTEC speakers are experts and innovators, leading the way in water quality. The following paper was presented at WEFTEC 2020.

As part of the industry’s direction towards nitrogen removal intensification in wastewater treatment, partial denitrification (PdN) is a promising and a more reliable alternative to partial nitrification (or nitritation) in mainstream deammonification processes, where heterotrophs (OHO) produce nitrite required for anaerobic ammonia oxidizers (AnAOB) for efficient nitrogen removal [4]. The process is called PdNA (i.e. PdN+AnAOB). It is estimated that 50% reduction in air requirement and 80% reduction in carbon addition can be achieved compared to conventional nitrification/denitrification. In this study, the biological denitrification reactions in Sumo 2 were modified to allow for partial denitrification (or denitratation) when volatile fatty acids are used as a carbon source. The model was calibrated using batch anoxic bioassays spiked with acetate and data from PdNA suspended growth pilot data. The validation runs had fairly constant nitrate uptake rates. Hence, the future work for developing and validating the model will entail calibrating the model using various carbon sources and at various nitrate specific uptake rates.

This study showed the potential of pre-anoxic partial denitrification – anammox (PdNA) application in achieving high TIN removal rates with both acetate as well as fermentation-based carbon. In addition, it was shown that the higher the VFA content within the soluble COD fraction of fermentation-based carbon sources, the higher the PdN selection. As fermentate composition is not easily managed in practice, design of the PdNA zones to operate at high nitrate removal rates can potentially help to maintain good PdN selection and thus PdNA rates for more complex carbon sources.

WEFTEC, the largest water event of its kind in North America, offers water quality professionals the best in water quality education and training. With almost 200 technical sessions, workshops, mobile sessions, local facility tours and 1,000+ exhibitors, it is the premier water conference! The WEFTEC technical program is selected through a rigorous, peer-review process, ensuring that attendees experience the highest-quality education. WEFTEC speakers are experts and innovators, leading the way in water quality. The following paper was presented at WEFTEC 2020.