As the utilities sector enters a new era, customer engagement is not just encouraged; it is expected. In 2018, social media has become a crucial part of digital communications strategies, making customers more informed and engaged than ever before. According to We Are Social, the number of social media users worldwide in 2018 is 3.196 billion.
A new study has linked wastewater treatment plants to microplastic pollution in rivers in the United Kingdom.
The architects of Denver’s water infrastructure had a knack for predicting the future. They planned for the population of the city to grow.
Last week, thousands of water professionals met for the industry’s annual flagship conference. This is an important event at an important time as we give attention to our nation’s infrastructure. While roads and bridges are visible reminders of the importance of infrastructure, equally important components are out of sight, but they need to always be in our mind. These critical components are underground pipelines that provide water and wastewater service.
On July 26, 2013 Gainesville Regional Utilities discovered a pipeline failure at a butt-fused welded joint on a 36” HDPE Sewer Force Main. It was determined that the joint failed due to a combination of several incorrect construction methods used during the installation of the pipeline. Once discovered, GRU installed JCM 102-3600 x 18” wide Multi Band Universal Clamp Couplings (4-band clamp) to temporarily seal the leak while a permanent repair was considered.
Hurricane Maria decimated Puerto Rico’s drinking water infrastructure last September.
The so-called brain-eating amoeba is back, once again creating challenges for water safety in Louisiana.
Significant innovation had occurred in the 17 years since the TrojanUV4000™ was installed at the Murfreesboro Water Resource Recovery Facility. Advancements associated with system efficacy, simplified maintenance, and energy efficiency had been introduced, all of which correlate to cost savings. Such advancements can all be found in the TrojanUVSigna™ – the UV system that was selected for the upgrade.
Communities around the world are facing a growing storm. Complex challenges including water scarcity, changing demographics, extreme weather patterns, and aging or overly stressed infrastructure are colliding to threaten critical water, energy, transport, enterprise and health networks. The water industry is in the eye of the storm.
Jet aeration systems are extremely efficient due to their high alpha factor and clean water oxygen transfer performance. Proper start-up, operation, and maintenance will ensure reliable service and a long life.
When California Governor Jerry Brown signaled lifted emergency conservation measures last year, many environmentalists worried that water savings achieved during the drought would dry up.
The New Rochelle Wastewater Treatment Plant is located in the Westchester County, New York, discharging to the Long Island Sound. It serves a population base of 65,000 people and is permitted to treat average flows of up to 20.6 MGD. Operating with primary clarification and pure oxygen-based activated sludge treatment since a 1979 upgrade, the plant only removed BOD and TSS from the wastewater.
Water, classified as one of the basic elements since ancient time, is so essential, so simple, yet can be so challenging to deliver at high quality in high volumes. Pursuing the “perfect” glass of water involves two major influences: 1) regulatory requirements and 2) aesthetics or organoleptic quality (i.e., taste, odor, appearance, etc.). To start, it helps to be blessed with the good fortune of good source water quality, but beyond that it comes down to how a water utility treats and “polishes” the final product. Even for utilities not totally obsessed with garnering national taste-test honors, here are several factors to be considered when searching for the perfect glass of water, and the role that turbidity measurement can play in them.
Turbidity, a measure of the cloudiness or haziness of a fluid, was originally intended as a qualitative measure of the aesthetics of drinking water. It is not a measure of actual particles in the water; it measures how much those particles affect light being transmitted through the water, or how that light reflects off particles in the water. Today’s turbidity designs and methods have been regimented in an attempt to bring quantitative consistency to the measurement for both aesthetic and pathogenic qualities of drinking water.
Conserving energy and saving costs are always on the minds of wastewater professionals. Aeration accounts for more than 50 percent of electrical usage at most treatment plants. Improved aeration efficiency will always work toward the goals of saving energy and reducing operating costs.
Ratepayers are debating the merits of a proposal for a new desalination plant in Orange County, CA.
Turbidity, as a measure of cloudiness or haze in water, has many useful applications for industrial processes, pharmaceutical manufacturing, environmental monitoring, and utility applications. Unlike general commercial applications, however, the use of turbidity readings in municipal drinking water treatment comes with unique demands and considerations related to regulatory compliance.
As industries expand, they typically need to increase the capacity of their wastewater treatment facilities. Increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, such as lower nitrogen limits, may also signal the need to boost treatment capacity. Installing additional tanks and larger equipment not only adds capital costs but increases operating costs as well.
September of 2017 was the busiest month of hurricane activity on record, according to the Weather Channel.
Turbidity measurement is both a nebulous, oft-misunderstood concept and the master link in a chain of events affecting U.S. EPA drinking water compliance. It can influence, or be influenced by, almost every other link in a water treatment process. Here is a quick overview of turbidity’s relationship to drinking water compliance standards and some tips for keeping a water treatment process in balance.
Access to clean, safe, fresh water is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. By some estimates over 1.5 billion people face water scarcity issues that directly threaten their health or economic welfare on a daily basis. More concerning, the impacts of climate change and global population growth are expected to exacerbate these issues to impact over 2.3 billion people by the year 2050. These sobering facts are why six of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are focused on providing access to clean, safe water. Part of solving this challenge is reducing industrial water consumption to conserve water resources.
Health regulators in Oregon are creating new regulations to protect drinking water from cyanotoxins.
I was having lunch with a former colleague a few months ago and the subject of produced water recycling came up. During the course of the conversation, he asked me: “Isn't this just a reverse Ponzi scheme with produced water? Ultimately, if they stop fracking, they [the operators] are going to have to deal with a lot of dirty water they don't need!”
A new research study links the use of oil and gas wastewater to the spread of air and water pollution.
The Aqua Caiman™ represents the next generation of multi-rake mechanical bar screens. In designing the screen, Parkson combined over 40 years of experience working on thousands of in-channel screen installations with in-depth market and engineering research. This allowed us to better understand the weaknesses of existing multi-rake and articulating rake screens.
Every water distribution utility has a strategy for infrastructure asset management and repair — from simply reacting to breaks, to scheduling main replacements based on system-specific history, to prioritizing infrastructure repairs based on mathematical calculations of risks and consequences.
It’s increasingly obvious to me that the gap in the general understanding of technology is continuously increasing with those that are not working in the space every day. I am referring to industrial technology versus the general consumer technology market.
Fine-tuning for best performance at water treatment plants (WTPs) and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) requires versatile and accurate instrumentation to monitor and respond to changing conditions. Getting the most out of those meters, gauges, and analyzers requires knowledgeable operators. That is why instrumentation decisions should be made not only on feature-rich technologies and quality performance, but also on the documented support and training that will enable staff to maximize the value of the investment.
A utility worker died while working under a manhole in Florida on Friday.
Economist Harold Pollack's New York Times article suggesting priorities for your philanthropic work was a fun read for those of us who would love to imagine what we would do with $131 billion. Unlike Pollack, I'm not going to tell you how to give away your money — you earned it, it's yours, and you can do what you want with it.
From the largest metropolitan water treatment plant (WTP) or wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) operations to the smallest rural systems, the goals are essentially the same — achieve regulatory compliance and the most efficient results at the lowest practical cost. The most feasible (i.e., affordable) control solutions vary by process, plant size, and budgetary limitations. Here are several high-level guidelines to achieving a common strategy that works across virtually all applications: good data, properly analyzed, yields good results.
In small Appalachian towns, finding enough money to maintain wastewater infrastructure is a big challenge.
Many water treatment plant upgrades and purchasing decisions are entirely determined by price. However, long term costs such as energy and maintenance, are often not considered in the initial stages. This potentially leaves water treatment plants with ongoing and reoccurring expenses, which could result in higher energy bills, increased purchases of spare parts, and operator labor time.
For years, centralized water and wastewater treatment facilities have been the norm. Large treatment plants typically provided the most cost-effective solution, due to economies of scale. However, new technology is tipping the scales, as decentralized treatment solutions are providing improved treatment at reduced costs.
In an industry faced with around-the-clock operations and penalties for noncompliance with regulatory standards, it can be easy to lose track of periodic maintenance requirements whose impacts might not be noticeable until it’s too late. Ignoring the influence that measurement and analytic equipment maintenance can have on water treatment plants (WTPs) or wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) can be costly. Fortunately, equipment suppliers who bundle after-sale services tailored to WTP and WWTP needs offer new opportunities for instrumentation users to stay ahead of the curve in terms of timely response to changing performance.
A man’s death sparked a water contamination scare in the Idaho town of Dietrich in late May.
When clarifiers are not settling like they should, problems arise, including reduced capacities, high sludge volume indexes (SVI) and sludge blanket levels, and infiltration/inflow (I/I) washout issues.
New Jersey water experts want the state to crack down on PFOS in drinking water.
This is the first post in a two-post series discussing the practical effect of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on construction, dedication, and utilization of water lines in Pennsylvania.
Most treatment systems for removing iron and manganese from groundwater sources use chlorine, oxygen or various other chemicals to oxidize the clear state of iron and manganese to an oxidized or solid form so the particles can then be filtered out. If complete oxidation occurs and if the oxidized floc is of suitable condition, a filtration system consisting of filter sand and anthracite is used.
As smaller public utilities strain against a lack of resources, many are pairing up to share the load. Two such cities are Libertyville and Mundelein in the Chicago, IL suburbs. Although deciding against consolidating their neighboring wastewater treatment plants, they recently agreed to share the cost and deployment of a laboratory technician.
The Baldy View Chapter of the Building Industry Association of Southern California recently released a survey that showed strong support for using recycled wastewater to recharge groundwater basins.
Cantel Medical Corp. (NYSE: CMD) today announced its entry into the dental wastewater management market through the recent launch of Syclone™ Amalgam Separator, previously marketed and sold under the brand name, Apavia™ Amalgam Separator.
Koch Membrane Systems, Inc. (Koch), a global leader in membrane filtration technologies, announced today its PURON Membrane Bio-Reactor (MBR) modules have been selected for the Ji’nan Wastewater Treatment Plant I and Plant II Expansion Project.
Technologies for wastewater treatment and plant optimisation were the winners of the Innovation Showcase at BlueTech Forum. The event attracted 200 delegates and took place in Vancouver, Canada on 6-7 June 2018.
California Water Service Group (“California Water”) recently issued the following statement in response to SJW Group’s (NYSE: SJW) (“SJW”) rejection of its cash tender offer to acquire all outstanding shares of SJW for $68.25 per share in cash.
Bentley Systems, Incorporated, a leading global provider of comprehensive software solutions for advancing infrastructure, recently announced that Bentley colleague, Thomas Walski, Ph.D. P.E., F. ASCE, F.
Fluence Corporation Limited announced recently that it has received a €3.9M contract for a wastewater treatment and waste-to-energy system for its customer ArcelorMittal.
The City of San Diego has awarded a multi-million, five-year consulting contract to DNV GL, which provides the Synergi Water hydraulic modeling software solution for improvement of water quality and reduction of leaks.
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The Golden Rule At Work Since 1905 |
Grundfos supplies a broad range of equipment and solutions designed specifically for water utility applications. Grundfos is at the forefront in promoting and facilitating energy efficiency and sustainable technology, ensuring that water supply and wastewater facilities meet future challenges and regulations.
To handle the odor control needs of municipal and government agencies, OMI Industries has created MUNI® odor neutralizing product.
Microclor® On-Site Hypochlorite Generation (OSHG) is the safe, reliable and sustainable solution for water or wastewater disinfection.
Superior quality leads to repeat customers
LG Chem Water Solutions develops, manufactures and markets the next generation of BWRO elements for water treatment. We offer industry-standard 8-inch and 4-inch element configurations that retrofit easily into standard pressure vessels.
The AM-TBR was designed to be cost effective to purchase and even more cost effective to maintain. The turbidimeter is modular to make servicing and cleaning quick and easy. The compact sample volume of 30 ml means that you will go through less calibration solution over time.
The TrojanUV3000™B is available with a controller that enables flow pacing to maximize operating efficiency and extend lamp life. The system turns UV lamp banks on and off automatically to ensure the required dose is met using the fewest lamps and least electricity. These simple, robust, and operator-friendly systems have demonstrated their effective, reliable performance in thousands of installations around the world.
Kaeser screw blowers use up to 35 percent less energy than conventional rotary blowers and even achieve significant energy savings compared to currently available screw blowers. The combination of a blower airend with high efficiency Sigma profile rotors, flow-optimized components, efficient power transmission and drive components ensures exceptional performance, guaranteed by Kaeser in accordance with the stringent requirements of ISO 1217.
The Aqua Caiman™ represents the next generation of multi-rake mechanical bar screens. In designing the screen, Parkson combined over 40 years of experience working on thousands of in-channel screen installations with in-depth market and engineering research. This allowed us to better understand the weaknesses of existing multi-rake and articulating rake screens.
This video provides a detailed explanation of the process and benefits of the MRI Inclined Plate Settler System over conventional settling methods. MRI’s Inclined Plate Settlers and Hoseless Cable-Vac Sludge Collectors combine in this system to provide a reduced footprint, cost savings, zero energy usage, and superior efficiency and effluent quality.
Find out the importance of total cost of ownership in wastewater treatment applications and how Atlas Copco supports this approach.
The new Ovivo MBR Knowledge Center and MICRODYN-NADIR Manufacturing Plant for BIO-CEL MBR Membrane Modules is a 27,000-square-foot facility that houses a fully automated, cutting edge membrane module production line, as well as offices for Ovivo designers, engineers, and technicians.
See and hear from the Head of Business Unit Americas, from representatives of GF Piping Systems sales companies in the US, Canada and Mexico, and from representatives of each manufacturing company in the US. This video introduction includes footage from inside and out many of the GF facilities in North America.
This video provides a simple overview of the screen’s creation, function, features and benefits. From the beginning, Parkson engineers took it a step further by working with a leading design firm to rethink the industry standard step style screen from the ground up. They reviewed current offerings on the market and improved upon the common weak points. The result is the most durable escalating screen out there – the Aqua Rhino.
ABB is the best partner throughout the entire water cycle. From extraction and treatment, to distribution and the management of the wastewater process, ABB supplies an extensive range of reliable measurement products and solutions. With the most expertise in water and wastewater applications worldwide, ABB is the partner to help customers choose the optimal measurement solution precisely meeting their requirements. Learn more.
Providing expert insight into the most important topics in the water and wastewater industry.
Water Online is the leading source of technical information and thought leadership for the drinking water and wastewater treatment community. If you are an operator, municipal manager, engineering consultant or industrial plant manager involved in the design or maintenance of stormwater, clean water and wastewater systems, you now have access to a comprehensive Web community delivering the latest updates on water and wastewater collection, treatment and distribution technologies to give you the knowledge to succeed in your industry.
In providing this technical information, the site offers detailed coverage of the basic operational elements of the water and wastewater industry: the resource management, supply, treatment and distribution of drinking water and the collection, treatment and disposal of stormwater and wastewater. Water Online covers the many ancillary functions that are required such as: nutrient removal, contaminant removal, wastewater aeration, water instrumentation, utility management and automatic meter reading (AMR), water quality analysis, water membranes, reverse osmosis and desalination, drinking water disinfection, wastewater filtration, pumps, flow control & measurement, stormwater management and sludge conditioning and disposal.
Water Online serves the information needs of engineers, water management planners, operational managers, consultants, elected officials, government personnel and others who are involved in the municipal water supply industry, and the municipal and industrial wastewater treatment field. Reflecting the dynamic and interactive character of the Web, Water Online is the most convenient source of technical, operational, product, management and regulatory information available for the water and wastewater industry.
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David Rager, Principal
