When water is consumed – by humans or other life and industrial processes, it must be treated before it can be discharged to a natural water resource or re-used for irrigation or household greywater. Nature has its water recovery processes, such as filtering into an aquifer and evaporation into vapor to become rain or snow. These natural processes don’t reconstitute water fast enough due to increased human water consumption and wastewater generation. This endangers adequate fresh water supply for many parts of the world. Although 70% of the Earth is covered by water, more than 97% of that is salinated water, and 1.5% is in frozen format. So only 1.5% of the earth’s water is available for human consumption. Proper sanitation and wastewater treatment are more important every year, as world population and water consumption increase. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are necessary to reconstitute the wastewater from human and industrial activity and produce effluent compatible with the discharge environment. Transcend Water is a company dedicated to designing wastewater treatment processes and facilities that meet these needs. In this article, we’ll examine plant design considerations and this company’s unique tool for addressing those factors.
Factors That Drive a WWTP Design
Here are some of the things a WWTP designer must address in a plant design:
- What volume of water will be treated?
- What contaminants must be removed from the water?
- What will the effluent be used for? How sensitive is the discharge area?
- What potential is there for future expansion? How much more throughput is likely?
- What environmental considerations affect the location? Heavy rain or snow? Extreme heat or cold? High winds?
- What factors complicate the physical site? Elevations? Size of the available area? Others?
What an Environmentally Friendly Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) Does, and Does Not, Do
To meet the definition of “environmentally friendly” the plant and its processes must do these things:
- Produce effluent compatible with the environmental sensitivity of the discharge area. Membrane filtration technology can clean many types of feed water to a level that allows the effluent to be used for non-potable household, irrigation, and many industrial purposes. Membrane technology also has the highest operating cost and may not be appropriate for some sites. The important thing is to consider all requirements and design a plant that best suits the site and the effluent requirements.
- The sludge from the treatment process must be handled in a way that benefits other processes or be disposed of in a manner suitable to the environment. If an on-site waste-to-energy facility can be included, that’s a good enhancement. What’s not useful to other processes can be incinerated or taken to a landfill.
- Be as economical to build and operate as possible.
At first glance, the last item may seem to have little to do with environmental friendliness. Consider that freeing up financial and human capital makes it available to other projects that can also benefit the environment.
Here are some things a sustainable WWTP must avoid doing:
- Unduly impact the environment and its setting with its carbon footprint, odor emanation, or other undesirable effects. Inviting site visits is a good way to help people see its benefits and view it as a friendly addition to the community.
- Consume large amounts of energy and other resources. Energy efficiency must be a constant quest in WWTP design. Carbon footprint is an important consideration.
How to Meet These Needs
Many of the design factors and system requirements for WWTP’s can be in conflict with each other. Producing the most efficient wastewater treatment process designs demands skillful work by expert and experienced water engineers.
The wastewater engineers turned computer programmers at Transcend Water meet these qualifications. They’ve developed the Transcend Design Generator, or TDG (an SaaS application), to generate conceptual wastewater treatment processes and plants within a few hours.
Developing WWTP designs with manual engineering procedures can take weeks or months for each design. Since every project in this business is time-critical, the long lead time is a serious dis-benefit of manual design. If a client wants to consider several design options, the engineering time can be multiplied.
Besides automatically maximizing positive considerations and minimizing negative ones, the fast process of the TDG offers the benefit of timely plant design, incorporating changes quickly and providing several options for a client to choose from.
The TDG is unique in the wastewater management industry. It’s being used by many of the largest water companies in the world to design their facilities.
To summarize, in order to preserve our fresh water supply, proper wastewater management is needed. Without that management, contamination of lakes, rivers, and other environmental elements is unavoidable. Engineers charged with designing a treatment plant will find a valuable resource in Transcend’s TDG.
By developing the TDG, Transcend Water has taken the lead in wastewater treatment process design. To learn more and contact them to see how their software can benefit your project, visit their website.
