With electricity consumption being a primary operating cost in water treatment and wastewater treatment, steps taken to optimize energy use are critical. Saving energy is more than just an on/off decision. Monitoring and managing energy use — from analyzing pump curves, to reducing non-revenue-water leaks, to scheduling operations around premium-rate windows — is essential. Fortunately, the payback potential can be impressive.
Trimble Telog offers a comprehensive remote monitoring system, Telogers, for wastewater collection system operators. Telogers provides an automated system of collecting, archiving, analyzing, presenting, reporting and sharing data from collection system remote assets such as flow meters, rain gauges, CSO/SSO surcharge sensors, lift stations, pretreatment water quality, air quality, and pressure sensors.
In 2005, in response to changes to the Canadian Drinking Water Quality guidelines, the Greater Vancouver Water District Board approved a proposal to upgrade the Coquitlam WTP with UV disinfection technology to act as the primary means of disinfection.
New York City is home to more than 8 million people, making it the most populous city in the United States. The majority of New York's drinking water is supplied by the Catskill/Delaware watershed, located approximately 100 miles outside the city. Historically, NYC has not filtered the water from this system, nor did they require any additional barriers to microbial contaminants due to the pristine nature of the watershed.
Russellville water treatment plant is a surface water plant using traditional clarification, filtration, and treatment. The plant historically has used traditional contact turbidimeters that employ tungsten lamps that required quarterly maintenance, but replaced their turbidimeters with Swan Turbiwell turbidimeters in 2012. Read the full report for a comparison of the performance of the Swan Turbiwell to the previously installed turbidimeters.
While the majority of household consumers believe that they deserve the full attention of a water system, from a revenue perspective this does not bear out. Though the average home faucet is undoubtedly valued by its drinking water provider, the reality is that the vast majority of drinking water revenue comes from heavy-use commercial and industrial operations.
I may not be “old school” in the water/wastewater industry, but I have been around long enough to see a number of ideas graduate from sideshow to center stage. In wastewater, the topic in the spotlight at the moment is water reuse — and its role won’t soon diminish. Depending on your part of the world, it will sooner or later be the norm — but the smart ones are planning ahead.
The reuse of industrial wastewater is becoming increasingly common because of water shortages, environmental necessities, economic incentives, government mandates, and societal desires. By David Christophersen, Technical Support Manager, Veolia Water Technologies
The main component of mixed oxidant solution (MOS) is chlorine and its derivatives hypochlorite and hypochlorous acid (ClO−, HClO). It also contains trace amounts of other chlor-oxygen species which work synergistically with the hypochlorite/hypochlorous acid to improve efficacy and performance. MOS is made from brine (salt) and energy, and is used for disinfecting, sanitizing and reducing the risk of infection due to pathogenic microorganisms in water and in other applications. It is particularly useful for customers who have specific challenges such as controlling biofilm or reducing disinfection byproducts exacerbated by biofilms.
A large treatment plant includes several treatment processes that contribute to providing quality recycled water pursuant to the state of California Title 22 regulations. Major treatment processes include raw wastewater pumping, preliminary treatment, primary treatment, secondary treatment, tertiary treatment with Parkson DynaSand® filters, and disinfection.
The industrial world is awash with data and new information from sensors, applications, equipment, and people. But the data is worthless if it is left untouched or not used to its full potential to gain insights and make better decisions.
Fox Thermal Flow Meters use a constant temperature differential (constant Δ T) technology to measure mass flow rate of air and gases.
Granular activated carbon (GAC) is an effective and proven technology for the removal of PFAS and many other harmful organic compounds. But, not all products are the same and using the right GAC can make the difference between success and failure.
Siemens offers to our customers the ability to both make process measurements and to remotely monitor the activity and health of that instrumentation without the need for SCADA systems or other expensive process control room products. By utilizing Siemens’ ability to offer unparalleled flow, level, pressure, temperature, and weight measurement as well as valve control, we can provide a broad range of process measurements and offer unequaled monitoring of the health and performance of those products.
The task of managing the quantity and quality of potable water is unimaginable without online instrumentation to help water utilities to measure, treat and deliver drinking water to consumers. ABB’s Aztec 600 colorimetric and ion-selective electrode (ISE) analyzers have been designed to measure the key parameters that affect water quality – aluminium, iron, manganese, phosphate, color, ammonia and fluoride.
The simplicity of the compact, battery-powered Telog HPR-31 enables you to put it to work within minutes of unpacking. Once installed, the Telog HPR-31 measures water pressure at user programmable rates up to four samples per second with its internal pressure transducer. You can determine how often such data is summarized for reporting. The recorder computes any combination of minimum, average and maximum pressure measurement at each interval according to your selection of statistics and recording intervals. Recorded data may be gathered via an RS-232 connector using a handheld device or a laptop.
Harmsco® Filtration Products is pleased to offer a solution to the ever increasing blue-algae blooms in water sources. A multi-barrier approach is necessary to physically remove intact (algae and cyanobacteria) before they rupture in the treatment process and then remove extracellular cyanobacteria through adsorption.
Some wastewater applications require chlorine residuals greater than can be effectively monitored using DPD due to the oxidation of the Wurster dye to a colorless Imine. Such applications include industrial wastewater processes that inherently have a high chlorine demand thereby requiring a more robust monitoring method.
Control of dissolved organics has been one of the highest priority concerns for most water treatment plants for over 20 years. Organics monitoring is an even more critical issue today in the face of more stringent regulations and concerns around trace organics, emerging contaminants, and even counter-terrorism or water security. Despite the critical need, many plants still rely primarily on turbidity for monitoring and process control.
QuEChERS is a Quick-Easy-Cheap-Effective-Rugged-Safe extraction method that has been developed for the determination of pesticide residues in agricultural commodities.
It seems that everywhere that you go in the water industry at the current time, somebody is talking about digital transformation…or if we go back five minutes, it was Water 4.0…and 10 minutes ago (it seems), it was “smart water.” These are all very well used buzzwords that the industry is destined to think about for a short-term and then promptly forget about. In reality, though, we as an industry have been hit by a number of different concepts for a number of different technological aspects for a good number of years now. For almost as long we have had a term for all of this — “widgets.”
Saturday will be the 84th playing of the Auburn vs. Alabama football game. The first was played in 1893, and following a tie in 1907, the game was not played again until 1948 after a mandate to resume by the state legislature. It’s as well-known as any college football rivalry, and many fans of other teams will acknowledge it as the nation’s most intense.
EPA’s Homeland Security Research Program (HSRP) aims to increase the United States’ capabilities to prepare for and respond to environmental disasters involving chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear substances (CBRN). As part of this effort, EPA researchers develop scientific data, methods, and tools that can be used by various stakeholders, including laboratories and on-scene coordinators, to increase the effectiveness of response.
Ultrafiltration systems can be engineered and designed in several possible combinations based on the application and source water quality. There are different membrane materials, membrane shapes, flow types, and configurations.
An inherent vertical of the global specialty chemicals space, hypochlorite bleaches market has been observing remarkable popularity of late. With rising incidences of infectious illnesses on a global scale, the demand for disinfectants, bleaching, and sanitization products is likely to accelerate. Hypochlorite bleaches are popular disinfection products with the ability to terminate a vast array of disease-causing bacteria, fungi, viruses, and fungi, provided they are used with adequate precautionary measures and adhere to specific usage guidelines.
Which process should you choose for your application?
In most developed countries, drinking water is regulated to ensure that it meets drinking water quality standards. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administers these standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).
Drinking water considerations can be divided into three core areas of concern:
Drinking Water Sources
Source water access is imperative to human survival. Sources may include groundwater from aquifers, surface water from rivers and streams and seawater through a desalination process. Direct or indirect water reuse is also growing in popularity in communities with limited access to sources of traditional surface or groundwater.
Source water scarcity is a growing concern as populations grow and move to warmer, less aqueous climates; climatic changes take place and industrial and agricultural processes compete with the public’s need for water. The scarcity of water supply and water conservation are major focuses of the American Water Works Association.
Drinking Water Treatment
Drinking Water Treatment involves the removal of pathogens and other contaminants from source water in order to make it safe for humans to consume. Treatment of public drinking water is mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. Common examples of contaminants that need to be treated and removed from water before it is considered potable are microorganisms, disinfectants, disinfection byproducts, inorganic chemicals, organic chemicals and radionuclides.
There are a variety of technologies and processes that can be used for contaminant removal and the removal of pathogens to decontaminate or treat water in a drinking water treatment plant before the clean water is pumped into the water distribution system for consumption.
The first stage in treating drinking water is often called pretreatment and involves screens to remove large debris and objects from the water supply. Aeration can also be used in the pretreatment phase. By mixing air and water, unwanted gases and minerals are removed and the water improves in color, taste and odor.
The second stage in the drinking water treatment process involves coagulation and flocculation. A coagulating agent is added to the water which causes suspended particles to stick together into clumps of material called floc. In sedimentation basins, the heavier floc separates from the water supply and sinks to form sludge, allowing the less turbid water to continue through the process.
During the filtration stage, smaller particles not removed by flocculation are removed from the treated water by running the water through a series of filters. Filter media can include sand, granulated carbon or manufactured membranes. Filtration using reverse osmosis membranes is a critical component of removing salt particles where desalination is being used to treat brackish water or seawater into drinking water.
Following filtration, the water is disinfected to kill or disable any microbes or viruses that could make the consumer sick. The most traditional disinfection method for treating drinking water uses chlorine or chloramines. However, new drinking water disinfection methods are constantly coming to market. Two disinfection methods that have been gaining traction use ozone and ultra-violet (UV) light to disinfect the water supply.
Drinking Water Distribution
Drinking water distribution involves the management of flow of the treated water to the consumer. By some estimates, up to 30% of treated water fails to reach the consumer. This water, often called non-revenue water, escapes from the distribution system through leaks in pipelines and joints, and in extreme cases through water main breaks.
A public water authority manages drinking water distribution through a network of pipes, pumps and valves and monitors that flow using flow, level and pressure measurement sensors and equipment.
Water meters and metering systems such as automatic meter reading (AMR) and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) allows a water utility to assess a consumer’s water use and charge them for the correct amount of water they have consumed.