Improving drinking water treatment without tariff impact: the Spanish case study

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 1357-1364 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Antonio Palomero-González ◽  
Francesc Hernández-Sancho

Abstract Water is essential for our lives and activities. Everyone can drink good quality water, the question is whether they have access to it in the first place. Water quality and its treatment depend on the water source. This treatment has costs that users have to pay in the water tariff. It is very important to establish a water tariff that permits the best water treatment and has a low impact on the users. Cost functions are a useful tool to predict costs before an implementation or improvement. This article, using three easy steps (analysis, obtaining costs and modification of the water tariff) proposes improving water purification treatment using cost functions in order to find the best solution for providing the best quality water with the least cost impact on the water tariff. This methodology aims to help supply managers justify their decisions in order to optimise the available economic resources.

2012 ◽  
Vol 209-211 ◽  
pp. 1981-1985 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dong Sheng Wang ◽  
Xing Peng Zhou ◽  
Xiao Ming Mo ◽  
Yi Wang

During drinking water treatment, the chemical dosing processes, such as coagulant dosing process, ozone dosing process and chlorine dosing process are usually manually operated based on the operator knowledge and experience. However, due to the variations of water quality, water flow and process operational conditions and characteristics of large time-delay and nonlinear for the chemical dosing processes, it is difficult to adjust the chemical dosages in time by operators to keep the treated water quality stable, especially during the periods of rapid and frequent variations of water quality, water flow and process operational conditions. Thus, the improvements of control methods for the chemical dosing processes are essential to the operation of drinking water treatment plants. The Xiangcheng Water Treatment Plant in Suzhou, China has been utilizing the automatic control for chemical dosing processes since February 2012. Automatic controllers are designed respectively for the coagulant dosing process, ozone dosing process and chlorine dosing process. After the implementation of automatic control, operators are not necessary to keep constant attention. In addition, due to the improvements of control accuracies for the chemical dosing processes, the chemical dosages are reduced on the premise of ensuring safe water. Thus, both of the human resource costs and material costs can be saved. The practical control results demonstrate the efficiencies of proposed methods.


Author(s):  
Zheng-Qian Liu ◽  
Bang-Jun Han ◽  
Gang Wen ◽  
Jun Ma ◽  
Sheng-Jun Wang ◽  
...  

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Grefte ◽  
M. Dignum ◽  
E. R. Cornelissen ◽  
L. C. Rietveld

Abstract. To guarantee a good water quality at the customers tap, natural organic matter (NOM) should be (partly) removed during drinking water treatment. The objective of this research was to improve the biological stability of the produced water by incorporating anion exchange (IEX) for NOM removal. Different placement positions of IEX in the treatment lane (IEX positioned before coagulation, before ozonation or after slow sand filtration) and two IEX configurations (MIEX® and fluidized IEX (FIX)) were compared on water quality as well as costs. For this purpose the pre-treatment plant at Loenderveen and production plant Weesperkarspel of Waternet were used as a case study. Both, MIEX® and FIX were able to remove NOM (mainly the HS fraction) to a high extent. NOM removal can be done efficiently before ozonation and after slow sand filtration. The biological stability, in terms of assimilable organic carbon, biofilm formation rate and dissolved organic carbon, was improved by incorporating IEX for NOM removal. The operational costs were assumed to be directly dependent of the NOM removal rate and determined the difference between the IEX positions. The total costs for IEX for the three positions were approximately equal (0.0631 € m−3), however the savings on following treatment processes caused a cost reduction for the IEX positions before coagulation and before ozonation compared to IEX positioned after slow sand filtration. IEX positioned before ozonation was most cost effective and improved the biological stability of the treated water.


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