Development of a wastewater treatment plant design tool.

Abstract

There are two fundamental reasons for treatment of wastewater that is, prevention of pollution and thereby protecting the environment, and protecting the public health by safe guarding water supplies and preventing the spread of water borne diseases. Proper design, construction together with good operation and maintenance are essential for waste water treatment plants (WWTP), in order to produce effluents which are satisfying the safe disposal standards prescribed by the regulatory authorities. Carrying out a design on WWTP under several conditions and various criteria is becoming complex, tedious and cumbersome. The era of Computer has resulted in a faster, accurate, and more advanced method of obtaining data, storage, processing and analysis. Several tools are being developed to design and solve various engineering problems and water resources engineering field is no exception. Some packages have been developed in this area in basic, C-language, visual basic etc. In this work a computer program in visual basic has been developed for comprehensive design of wastewater treatment plant which incorporates activated sludge process as biological treatment method. All the units of WWTP are included in the design and the program is developed in a very user friendly manner by referring various standard procedures and manuals. Design for the checks was also developed in tooltips. Some of the checks include: Aeration Period, Sludge Retention Time, Volumetric Loading and Return Sludge ratio. Visual Basic Package was adopted for the design. The validity of the software has been verified by test running and comparison with an existing plant data. This program not only helps in sizing the treatment units but also helps in understanding the plant’s capacity.