scholarly journals Batch test to evaluate microbial disinfectant decay and the onset of nitrification

Author(s):  
Daniel B. Scott ◽  
Michele I. Van Dyke ◽  
William B. Anderson ◽  
Patrick W. King ◽  
Peter M. Huck

Abstract A batch test procedure was investigated to provide insight into the microbial contribution to disinfectant decay in drinking water distribution systems using chloramines. A modified method for determining the critical threshold residual (CTR), the intersection point on a semi-log plot between first-order total chlorine fitted decay curves before and after the breakpoint, was developed. Unlike the CTR as originally defined, initial sample conditions were retained rather than artificially raising the monochloramine concentrations. The CTR calculated with this modified method can more easily be applied to distribution system scenarios. In addition, four types of decay curves were identified and could distinguish differences in the microbial contribution to disinfectant residual decay. This study revealed that chloramine decay batch tests should be evaluated based on decay curve type, decay rates, and the CTR value, in addition to the microbial decay factor, which has been used alone in previous studies. The batch test approach and evaluation criteria established here can be used to predict conditions favorable for rapid chloramine decay and nitrification, and that monitoring and control strategies should be implemented.

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 571-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Arminski ◽  
Tomasz Zubowicz ◽  
Mietek A. Brdys

Abstract Drinking Water Distribution Systems (DWDSs) play a key role in sustainable development of modern society. They are classified as critical infrastructure systems. This imposes a large set of highly demanding requirements on the DWDS operation and requires dedicated algorithms for on-line monitoring and control to tackle related problems. Requirements on DWDS availability restrict the usability of the real plant in the design phase. Thus, a proper model is crucial. Within this paper a DWDS multi-species quality model for simulation and design is derived. The model is composed of multiple highly inter-connected modules which are introduced to represent chemical and biological species and (above all) their interactions. The chemical part includes the processes of chloramine decay with additional bromine catalysis and reaction with nitrogen compounds. The biological part consists of both heterotrophic and chemo-autotrophic bacteria species. The heterotrophic bacteria are assumed to consume assimilable organic carbon. Autotrophs are ammonia oxidizing bacteria and nitrite oxidizing bacteria species which are responsible for nitrification processes. Moreover, Disinfection By-Products (DBPs) are also considered. Two numerical examples illustrate the derived model’s behaviour in normal and disturbance operational states.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 3242-3250
Author(s):  
Danielle C. Pilarski ◽  
Brian D. Barkdoll

Abstract ‘Emerging contaminants’ are newly introduced into the environment through release into surface waters from wastewater treatment effluent, manufacturing, and agricultural use. How emerging contaminants move through water systems is unclear. Since the decay rates of emerging contaminants in piping systems have not been determined, this study determines the importance of decay rate on concentration throughout a distribution system and also determines how the system layout effects concentration. Systems were modeled to determine the time to peak contamination for a clean system becoming contaminated, as well as a contaminated system being cleaned of contamination. It was found that only emerging contaminants with second-order decay at the highest rate observed did not build up to high concentrations. The position of storage tanks in the distribution system affected the rate at which contaminants cleared the system, and systems with a branched layout could be cleared of contamination faster than systems containing loops.


2001 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda A Maddison ◽  
Graham A Gagnon ◽  
John D Eisnor

Corrosion in drinking water distribution systems is an important issue for many water utilities because it can lead to water losses, increased headloss, and deterioration in water quality. The objective of this investigation was to evaluate the effectiveness of different corrosion control strategies for maintaining water quality in the Halifax regional distribution system. The corrosion control methods investigated at the pilot scale were lime addition, polyphosphate addition, and pH adjustment with NaOH. The strategies were evaluated with both pilot- and full-scale distribution systems. The pilot-scale system used in the investigation consisted of four 1.5-m sections of 100-year-old cast-iron pipe. Water flowed continuously through the pipe section for the first phase of the pilot-scale investigation. For the second phase of the pilot study, water was allowed to stand in the pipe for 1, 3, 6, and 12 h, which was intended to represent a no-flow or dead zone in the distribution system. Eight sampling points were used in the full-scale portion of the investigation. The hydraulic retention times of the sampling point ranged from 1.5 to 55 h. Both the lime and polyphosphate treatments provided similar performance during the pilot-scale continuous flow and standing periods. However, lime addition significantly increased post-filtered turbidity levels, which resulted in excessive deposition of insoluble material during the standing periods. At full scale, polyphosphates provided better corrosion protection than pH adjustment with NaOH. Based on both pilot- and full-scale data collection, polyphosphate was considered as the preferred corrosion control strategy for the Halifax regional distribution system.Key words: corrosion, water distribution system, corrosion control, polyphosphates, cast iron.


2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiang Xu ◽  
Qiuwen Chen ◽  
Weifeng Li

The water loss from a water distribution system is a serious problem for many cities, which incurs enormous economic and social loss. However, the economic and human resource costs to exactly locate the leakage are extraordinarily high. Thus, reliable and robust pipe failure models are demanded to assess a pipe's propensity to fail. Beijing City was selected as the case study area and the pipe failure data for 19 years (1987–2005) were analyzed. Three different kinds of methods were applied to build pipe failure models. First, a statistical model was built, which discovered that the ages of leakage pipes followed the Weibull distribution. Then, two other models were developed using genetic programming (GP) with different data pre-processing strategies. The three models were compared thereafter and the best model was applied to assess the criticality of all the pipe segments of the entire water supply network in Beijing City based on GIS data.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1163
Author(s):  
Mengning Qiu ◽  
Avi Ostfeld

Steady-state demand-driven water distribution system (WDS) solution is the bedrock for much research conducted in the field related to WDSs. WDSs are modeled using the Darcy–Weisbach equation with the Swamee–Jain equation. However, the Swamee–Jain equation approximates the Colebrook–White equation, errors of which are within 1% for ϵ/D∈[10−6,10−2] and Re∈[5000,108]. A formulation is presented for the solution of WDSs using the Colebrook–White equation. The correctness and efficacy of the head formulation have been demonstrated by applying it to six WDSs with the number of pipes ranges from 454 to 157,044 and the number of nodes ranges from 443 to 150,630. The addition of a physically and fundamentally more accurate WDS solution method can improve the quality of the results achieved in both academic research and industrial application, such as contamination source identification, water hammer analysis, WDS network calibration, sensor placement, and least-cost design and operation of WDSs.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1247
Author(s):  
Lydia Tsiami ◽  
Christos Makropoulos

Prompt detection of cyber–physical attacks (CPAs) on a water distribution system (WDS) is critical to avoid irreversible damage to the network infrastructure and disruption of water services. However, the complex interdependencies of the water network’s components make CPA detection challenging. To better capture the spatiotemporal dimensions of these interdependencies, we represented the WDS as a mathematical graph and approached the problem by utilizing graph neural networks. We presented an online, one-stage, prediction-based algorithm that implements the temporal graph convolutional network and makes use of the Mahalanobis distance. The algorithm exhibited strong detection performance and was capable of localizing the targeted network components for several benchmark attacks. We suggested that an important property of the proposed algorithm was its explainability, which allowed the extraction of useful information about how the model works and as such it is a step towards the creation of trustworthy AI algorithms for water applications. Additional insights into metrics commonly used to rank algorithm performance were also presented and discussed.


Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 695 ◽  
Author(s):  
Weiwei Bi ◽  
Yihui Xu ◽  
Hongyu Wang

Over the past few decades, various evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been applied to the optimization design of water distribution systems (WDSs). An important research area is to compare the performance of these EAs, thereby offering guidance for the selection of the appropriate EAs for practical implementations. Such comparisons are mainly based on the final solution statistics and, hence, are unable to provide knowledge on how different EAs reach the final optimal solutions and why different EAs performed differently in identifying optimal solutions. To this end, this paper aims to compare the real-time searching behaviour of three widely used EAs, which are genetic algorithms (GAs), the differential evolution (DE) algorithm and the ant colony optimization (ACO). These three EAs are applied to five WDS benchmarking case studies with different scales and complexities, and a set of five metrics are used to measure their run-time searching quality and convergence properties. Results show that the run-time metrics can effectively reveal the underlying searching mechanisms associated with each EA, which significantly goes beyond the knowledge from the traditional end-of-run solution statistics. It is observed that the DE is able to identify better solutions if moderate and large computational budgets are allowed due to its great ability in maintaining the balance between the exploration and exploitation. However, if the computational resources are rather limited or the decision has to be made in a very short time (e.g., real-time WDS operation), the GA can be a good choice as it can always identify better solutions than the DE and ACO at the early searching stages. Based on the results, the ACO performs the worst for the five case study considered. The outcome of this study is the offer of guidance for the algorithm selection based on the available computation resources, as well as knowledge into the EA’s underlying searching behaviours.


2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. R. Furnass ◽  
R. P. Collins ◽  
P. S. Husband ◽  
R. L. Sharpe ◽  
S. R. Mounce ◽  
...  

The erosion of the cohesive layers of particulate matter that causes discolouration in water distribution system mains has previously been modelled using the Prediction of Discolouration in Distribution Systems (PODDS) model. When first proposed, PODDS featured an unvalidated means by which material regeneration on pipe walls could be simulated. Field and laboratory studies of material regeneration have yielded data that suggest that the PODDS formulations incorrectly model these processes. A new model is proposed to overcome this shortcoming. It tracks the relative amount of discolouration material that is bound to the pipe wall over time at each of a number of shear strengths. The model formulations and a mass transport model have been encoded as software, which has been used to verify the model's constructs and undertake sensitivity analyses. The new formulations for regeneration are conceptually consistent with field and laboratory observed data and have potential value in the proactive management of water distribution systems, such as evaluating change in discolouration risk and planning timely interventions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 875529302110380
Author(s):  
Agam Tomar ◽  
Henry V Burton ◽  
Ali Mosleh

A framework for dynamically updating post-earthquake functional recovery forecasts is presented to reduce the epistemic uncertainty in the predictive model. A Bayesian Network (BN) model is used to provide estimates of the total recovery time, and a process-based discrete event simulation (PBDES) model generates forecasts of the complete recovery trajectory. Both models rely on component damage and duration-based input parameters that are dynamically updated using Bayes’ theorem, as information becomes available throughout the recovery process. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated through an application to the pipe network of the City of Napa water distribution system. More specifically, pipe damage and repair data from the 2014 earthquake are used as a point of comparison for the dynamic forecasts. It is shown that, over time, the mean value of the total recovery duration generated by the BN-based model converges to the observed value and the dispersion is reduced. Also, despite a crude initial estimate, the median trajectory generated by the PBDES model provides a reasonable approximation of the observed recovery within 30 days following the earthquake. The proposed framework can be used by emergency managers to investigate the efficacy of post-event mitigation measures (e.g. crew allocation, resource prioritization) utilizing the most current data and knowledge.


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