Advanced data management for optimising the operation of a full-scale WWTP

The lack of appropriate data management tools is presently a limiting factor for a broader implementation and a more efficient use of sensors and analysers, monitoring systems and process controllers in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). This paper presents a technical solution for advanced data management of a full-scale WWTP. The solution is based on an efficient and intelligent use of the plant data by a standard centralisation of the heterogeneous data acquired from different sources, effective data processing to extract adequate information, and a straightforward connection to other emerging tools focused on the operational optimisation of the plant such as advanced monitoring and control or dynamic simulators. A pilot study of the advanced data manager tool was designed and implemented in the Galindo-Bilbao WWTP. The results of the pilot study showed its potential for agile and intelligent plant data management by generating new enriched information combining data from different plant sources, facilitating the connection of operational support systems, and developing automatic plots and trends of simulated results and actual data for plant performance and diagnosis.     

Study on an Intelligent Inference Engine in Early-Warning System of Dam Health

With systems engineering and artificial intelligent methods, an early-warning system of dam health (EWSDH) is developed. This system consists of integration control module, intelligent inference engine (IIE), support base cluster, information management and input/output modules. As a central processing unit of EWSDH, IIE is a decision support system for monitoring the operation characteristics and diagnosing unexpected behaviour of dam health. With the time-frequency domain localization properties and self-learning ability of wavelet networks based on wavelet frames, IIE builds some new monitoring models of dam health. The models are used to approximate and forecast the operation characteristics of dam. The methods of attributions reduction in rough sets theory are presented to diagnose adaptively the unexpected behaviour. The proposed system has been used to monitor dam health successfully.     

Scalable mobile information system to support the treatment process and the workflow of wastewater facilities.

In order to support the operation of wastewater systems and the workflow of sewage systems an application for demonstration has been developed to show exemplarily how a mobile information system can be transferred into practice and used by the staff. The paper presents a scalable information visualisation system, which can be used with mobile devices. The regarded information data does not only include process data, but also general information about buildings and units, work directions, occupational safety regulations as well as instructions of first aid in case of a work accident. This is particularly appropriate for the use in remote facilities. The implementation is based on but not limited to SQL, JSP and HTML.     

Disturbance detection in wastewater treatment plants

The development in sensor technology has made many wastewater treatment systems data rich but not necessarily information rich. To extract the adequate information from several sensors is not trivial, and it is not sufficient to consider only the time series. Different tools for detecting unusual on-line measurement data and deviating process behaviour are discussed. In this paper various dimension reduction as well as advanced filtering methods are considered in order to extract adequate information for fault detection and diagnosis. Both the operator and the process engineer can take advantage of such methods for proper monitoring of the plant, in particular extreme events and their causes.     

Decision support tools for urban water and wastewater systems--focussing on hazardous flows assessment.

The Swedish research programme Urban Water has developed a concept of a multi-criteria basis intended to support decision-making for urban water and wastewater systems. Five criteria groups were established for sustainability assessment of urban water systems: Health and Hygiene, Environment, Economy, Socio-culture, and Technology. Each criterion requires a set of indicators corresponding to quantifiable facts and figures, or qualitative data to comparatively assess the different alternatives in the decision process. The decision support process starts as a baseline study where the existing conditions are addressed. Alternative strategies of the future urban water system are developed and analysed by different tools and methodologies in assessing the five criteria groups. Eventually, the results and conclusions are integrated and synthesised into a basis for decision-making. As an example of a decision support basis for chemical safety, a barrier perspective was introduced to find out if and to what extent hazardous substances can be stopped, diverged, or transformed at various points in the wastewater system. A set of barriers was suggested, i.e. behaviour, systems design, process design, optional recipients, and organisational. The barrier approach was applied to two alternative municipal wastewater system designs--a combined wastewater system vs. a source separated system--analysing the fate of phosphorus, cadmium, and triclosan. The study showed that the combined system caused a higher substance flow to the receiving waterbody than the separated system. The combined system also brought more phosphorus and cadmium to the farmland than the separated system, but only half the amount of triclosan.     

A knowledge management methodology for the integrated assessment of WWTP configurations during conceptual design

The current complexity involved in wastewater management projects is arising as the XXI century sets new challenges leading towards a more integrated plant design. In this context, the growing number of innovative technologies, stricter legislation and the development of new methodological approaches make it difficult to design appropriate flow schemes for new wastewater projects. Thus, new tools are needed for the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) conceptual design using integrated assessment methods in order to include different types of objectives at the same time i.e. environmental, economical, technical, and legal. Previous experiences used the decision support system (DSS) methodology to handle the specific issues related to wastewater management, for example, the design of treatment facilities for small communities. However, tools developed for addressing the whole treatment process independently of the plant size, capable of integrating knowledge from many different areas, including both conventional and innovative technologies are not available. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present and describe an innovative knowledge-based methodology that handles the conceptual design of WWTP process flow-diagrams (PFDs), satisfying a vast number of different criteria. This global approach is based on a hierarchy of decisions that uses the information contained in knowledge bases (KBs) with the aim of automating the generation of suitable WWTP configurations for a specific scenario. Expert interviews, legislation, specialized literature and engineering experience have been integrated within the different KBs, which indeed constitute one of the main highlights of this work. Therefore, the methodology is presented as a valuable tool which provides customized PFD for each specific case, taking into account process unit interactions and the user specified requirements and objectives.     

大体积混凝土防裂智能监控系统

为达到混凝土温控防裂的目的,并提高施工质量,研究开发了大体积混凝土防裂智能监控系统。该系统由感知、互联、分析决策和控制4个部分组成,可以实现原材料预冷、混凝土拌和、运输、入仓、平仓、振捣、通水冷却、表面养护全过程温控信息的自动感知、传输、互联、共享环节的智能控制,实现了基于互联网、物联网技术的温控防裂全要素、全过程管理。实际工程应用表明,该智能监控系统可实现现场温控实施情况的自动获取、准确掌握、实时评估、智能干预及决策支持,能有效提高混凝土施工的管理水平,防止裂缝的发生。     

A flexible modelling environment for integrated urban water harvesting and re-use

The steady increase of urban population and the possible effects of climate change that may adversely affect the amount of water available in current water supply systems, makes the study of stormwater and rainwater harvesting and wastewater recycling a high priority. The basic proposition is that any system of water supply that can reduce the amount of water drawn from main reservoirs will be of benefit to the whole supply region especially in terms of drought security. This paper describes a versatile modelling framework which can simulate a wide variety of combinations of centralised and decentralised Integrated Urban Water Management schemes from the allotment to the whole suburb scale. The framework combines two modelling approaches. The first, called urbanCycle, simulates water supply and demand, stormwater and wastewater using allotments as the basic building block. Although urbanCycle can simulate processes in great detail, it assumes that the network forms a directed acyclic graph. This simplifies the connectivity logic but precludes investigation of systems with decentralised storage, feedbacks and multiple supply paths. To overcome this, a second model, called urbanNet, based on network linear programming, is embedded in the urbanCycle framework to enable the modelling of recycling and harvesting options, as well as on-the-fly supply and demand decision making, based on objectives rather than pre-set operating rules.     

Making decentralised systems viable: a guide to managing decentralised assets and risks.

Decentralised systems have the potential to provide a viable option for long term sustainable management of household wastewater. Yet, at present, such systems hold an uncertain status and are frequently omitted from consideration. Their potential can only be realised with improved approaches to their management, and improved methods to decision-making in planning of wastewater systems. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the value of a novel framework to guide the planning of decentralised systems so that asset management and risk management are explicitly considered. The framework was developed through a detailed synthesis of literature and practice in the area of asset management of centralised water and wastewater systems, and risk management in the context of decentralised systems. Key aspects of the framework are attention to socio-economic risks as well as engineering, public health and ecological risks, the central place of communication with multiple stakeholders and establishing a shared asset information system. A case study is used to demonstrate how the framework can guide a different approach and lead to different, more sustainable outcomes, by explicitly considering the needs and perspectives of homeowners, water authorities, relevant government agencies and society as a whole.     

Contribution of Geographic Information Systems and location models to planning of wastewater systems.

This paper presents the contributions of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and location models towards planning regional wastewater systems (sewers and wastewater treatment plants) serving small agglomerations, i.e. agglomerations with less than 2,000 inhabitants. The main goal was to develop a decision support tool for tracing and locating regional wastewater systems. The main results of the model are expressed in terms of number, capacity and location of Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTP) and the length of main sewers. The decision process concerning the location and capacity of wastewater systems has a number of parameters that can be optimized. These parameters include the total sewer length and number, capacity and location of WWTP. The optimization of parameters should lead to the minimization of construction and operation costs of the integrated system. Location models have been considered as tools for decision support, mainly when a geo-referenced database can be used. In these cases, the GIS may represent an important role for the analysis of data and results especially in the preliminary stage of planning and design. After selecting the spatial location model and the heuristics, two greedy algorithms were implemented in Visual Basic for Applications on the ArcGIS software environment. To illustrate the application of these algorithms a case study was developed, in a rural area located in the central part of Portugal.     

流域综合治理一体化管控平台系统解决方案

为系统解决流域水环境问题,践行“流域统筹、系统治理”的理念,以某市流域综合治理项目为例,阐述流域综合治理一体化管控平台系统解决方案。该平台通过建设水质、污水管网等监测监控感知体系,并整合流域水环境、水务及市政相关管理信息资源,实现流域水质、管网等相关信息的实时处理与呈现,再经大数据分析,为流域提供实时水质预报、预警,并实现以目标为导向的智能化运维管理,为流域水环境长治久清提供信息化决策支持。该平台作为流域综合治理工程的重要非工程措施,其设计成果已通过专家评审,正在推进实施。     

Discussion of the enabling environments for decentralised water systems

Decentralised water supply systems are becoming increasingly affordable and commonplace in Australia and have the potential to alleviate urban water shortages and reduce pollution into natural receiving marine and freshwater streams. Learning processes are necessary to support the efficient implementation of decentralised systems. These processes reveal the complex socio-technical and institutional factors to be considered when developing an enabling environment supporting decentralised water and wastewater servicing solutions. Critical to the technological transition towards established decentralised systems is the ability to create strategic and adaptive capacity to promote learning and dialogue. Learning processes require institutional mechanisms to ensure the lessons are incorporated into the formulation of policy and regulation, through constructive involvement of key government institutions. Engagement of stakeholders is essential to the enabling environment. Collaborative learning environments using systems analysis with communities (social learning) and adaptive management techniques are useful in refining and applying scientists' and managers' knowledge (knowledge management).     

Applications of Artificial Neural Networks in integrated water management: fiction or future?

An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is nowadays recognized as a very promising tool for relating input data to output data. It is said that the possibilities of artificial neural networks are unlimited. Here we focus on the potential role of neural networks in integrated water management. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is a mathematical methodology which describes relations between cause (input data) and effects (output data) irrespective of the process laying behind and without the need for making assumptions considering the nature of the relations. The applications are widespread and vary from optimization of measuring networks, operational water management, prediction of drinking water consumption, on-line steering of wastewater treatment plants and sewage systems, up to more specific applications such as establishing a relationship between the observed erosion of groyne field sediments and the characteristics of passing vessels on the river Rhine. Especially where processes are complex, neural networks can open new possibilities for understanding and modelling these kinds of complex processes. Besides explaining the method of ANN this paper shows different applications. Three examples have been worked out in more detail. An intelligent monitoring system is shown for the on-line prediction of water consumption, ANN are successfully used for sludge cost monitoring and optimizing wastewater treatment and the usage of ANN is shown in optimizing and monitoring water quality measuring networks. An ANN appears to be a multiuse and powerful tool for modelling complex processes.     

Selection of variables using factorial discriminant analysis for the state identification of an anaerobic UASB-UAF hybrid pilot plant, fed with winery effluents.

Anaerobic wastewater treatment has become a widely used method for wastewater depuration, and has been applied in a wide range of situations, from urban wastewater to highly toxic industrial wastewater. Particularly it has been successfully applied to the treatment of the beverage industries effluents. To avoid the destabilization of the system a monitoring diagnosis and control system of the depuration processes is necessary. The cost of this system is an important issue, that depends on the number of parameters that must be controlled for an adequate performance of a wastewater plant control system. This work shows how the classic statistical classification techniques can be applied to determine the number variables that must be monitored to achieve an adequate performance of anaerobic UASB-UAF hybrid Pilot Plant monitoring and control system. The obtained results had not been unique, so different combinations of variables can be selected for a good wastewater treatment process control. Economic or technical criteria may be considered to determine the final variables set in each particular situation.     

淮河流域信息化系统建设与管理

淮河流域已建成气象信息系统、水情信息采集和处理系统及防汛通信系统,在防汛工作中起到了重要作用,目前仍有水情、工情、灾情信息采集系统、防汛决策支持系统等信息化系统在规划建设过程中。在建设中应循序渐进,与管理体制改革,与应用需要相结合,才能更好地为流域防灾减灾提供决策支持。     

Sewer odour abatement monitoring - an Australian survey

Odourous emissions from sewer networks can significantly impact a local population causing odour annoyance. A survey of nine Australian wastewater utilities that serve over 8.4 million people and operate over 59,000 km of sewer networks was undertaken to summarise the current monitoring practices in Australia with the view to assist the water industry to further improve their practices in operating and monitoring sewer odour abatement systems. Results indicated that most odour abatement systems were monitored through complaints from the surrounding community, H(2)S is the dominant online and offline monitoring parameter and that a variety of different H(2)S instruments are used across the industry but the reported use is dominated by two manufacturers. The monitoring data were primarily used for decision making and diagnosis, and there was limited use of non-H(2)S odourant analysis. The water industry had several significant limitations in terms of its inability to provide gas flow data, process monitoring and complaint data as well as being able to link process monitoring data with maintenance information for instrumentation. The improved collection and management of this data would yield benefits to the water industry in terms of odour abatement design, performance and management.     

Centralised versus decentralised wastewater systems?

A host of centralised and decentralised systems are available for wastewater disposal purposes. Consequently, selecting the right system calls for a comprehensive and, above all, unbiased assessment of the alternatives. Costs and unsettled ecological issues can be adduced to show that total rejection of one system or the other is not warranted. An ecological assessment that, for example, also covers hygienic aspects is only in its infancy and an intensification of research work is necessary. The example of a conurbation is used to illustrate the interplay of centralised and decentralised elements.     

Temperature and conductivity as control parameters for pollution-based real-time control.

Most sewer system performance indicators are not easily measurable online at high frequencies in wastewater systems, which hampers real-time control with those parameters. Instead of using a constituent of wastewater, an alternative could be to use characteristics of wastewater that are relatively easily measurable in sewer systems and could serve as indicator parameters for the dilution process of wastewater. This paper focuses on the possibility to use the parameters of temperature and conductivity. It shows a good relation of temperature and conductivity with the dilution of DWF (dry weather flow) during WWF (wet weather flow) a monitoring station in Graz, Austria, as an example. The simultaneous monitoring of both parameters leads to valuable back-up information in case one parameter (temperature) shows no reaction to a storm event. However, for various reasons, anomalies occur in the typical behaviour of both parameters. The frequency and extent of these anomalies will determine the usefulness of the proposed parameters in a system for pollution-based real-time control. Both the normal behaviour and the anomalies will be studied further by means of trend and correlation analyses of data to be obtained from a monitoring network for the parameters of interest that is currently being set up in the Netherlands.     

高RCC拱坝施工期温控决策支持平台研究

混凝土高坝开裂是普遍存在的现象,国内外许多混凝土坝都因施工裂缝而被迫停工处理。混凝土高坝的浇筑施工过程受到自然环境、结构形式、温控、资源等多种因素的影响,如何综合考虑这些影响因素制定切实可行的大坝浇筑施工计划,并在施工过程中加强对混凝土温度和应力的实时监控和科学管理十分必要。混凝土高坝施工过程决策支持系统的研究开发,能够为水电大坝的建设和安全提供先进的管理路径,具有巨大的潜在效益。以立洲水电站工程为依托,研发了高RCC拱坝施工期温控决策支持平台,实现了碾压参数、温控信息、监测数据和仿真成果等数据信息的高效管理,大坝温控防裂效果和趋势的实时监控和预测预警,以及专家远程会商决策支持,对促进高RCC拱坝施工温控决策支持科学化水平和确保施工质量具有重要意义。     

Wastewater treatment with submerged fixed bed biofilm reactor systems--design rules, operating experiences and ongoing developments.

Wastewater treatment systems using bio-films that grow attached to a support media are an alternative to the widely used suspended growth activated sludge process. Different fixed growth biofilm reactors are commercially used for the treatment of municipal as well as industrial wastewater. In this paper a fairly new fixed growth biofilm system, the submerged fixed bed biofilm reactor (SFBBR), is discussed. SFBBRs are based on aerated submerged fixed open structured plastic media for the support of the biofilm. They are generally operated without sludge recirculation in order to avoid clogging of the support media and problems with the control of the biofilm. Reactor and process design considerations for these reactors are reviewed. Measures to ensure the development and maintenance of an active biofilm are examined. SFBBRs have been applied successfully to small wastewater treatment plants where complete nitrification but no high degree of denitrification is necessary. For the pre-treatment of industrial wastewater the use of SFBBRs is advantageous, especially in cases of wastewater with high organic loading or high content of compounds with low biodegradability. Performance data from exemplary commercial plants are given. Ongoing research and development efforts aim at achieving a high simultaneous total nitrogen (TN) removal of aerated SFBBRs and at improving the efficiency of TN removal in anoxic SFBBRs.