The Best Way to Design a WWTP – We Tell You the Secret!

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The Best Way to Design a WWTP

Humans and many other organisms need water to sustain life. In addition, people desire lifestyle enhancements produced by processes that need water as well. When we use water for household or industrial purposes, we render it unsuitable for further use until it’s been treated.

Water is purified naturally by filtering into aquifers and evaporating into the atmosphere to return as rain or snow. With increases in human activity in recent centuries, these natural processes can’t produce an adequate supply of clean water. Enhancements such as rainwater collection systems can help but still often fall short of people’s needs.

Where natural water recovery is inadequate, and to avoid unsightly and unhealthy pollution, WWTPs (wastewater treatment plants) add to the available supply of water to be used for many purposes. Good treatment plants can produce water suitable for non-potable household use, such as flushing toilets. It can also be used for many industrial purposes and for irrigation.

Especially in populous areas, wastewater treatment facilities are necessary to reconstitute the wastewater from human and industrial activity and produce water compatible with the area it’s discharged into. Of course, these processes must produce as little pollution as possible in conjunction with their clean-water production.

Transcend Water is a company dedicated to designing wastewater treatment processes that meet these needs. Environmental friendliness is a constant focus at Transcend; it would be counter-productive to sully the environment while cleaning up the wastewater.

This article will examine plant design considerations and this company’s tool for addressing those factors.

What Must a WWTP Design Consider?

The engineer charged with creating a WWTP design that does the job where the plant will be located must answer these questions:

  • What volume of influent must be treated?
  • How is the feed water contaminated? What must be removed?
  • What uses will be made of the treated water?
  • Is it likely that treatment needs will grow? How much more wastewater is likely to need treatment in the future?
  • What about the physical location? Is it subject to heavy snow, rain, or wind? Does it get abnormally hot or cold?
  • What complicates the site? Is it hilly? How big is the area available?

Here are Some “Dos and Don’ts” for an Environmentally Friendly Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP)

A good eco-friendly plant must:

  • Leave the water clean enough to be compatible with the use or discharge area that will receive it.
  • Contain the sludge from the process so it doesn’t contaminate anything and can feed other processes. An on-site waste-to-energy plant is a good thing to have if the site can accommodate it.
  • Be built, and designed to operate, as economically as possible.

You may think economical construction and operation are unrelated to environmental considerations. However, consider that the freed-up resources can be employed in another environment-improving project.

Sustainable WWTPs must avoid:

  • Contaminating anything more than necessary. The sludge from the treated water should be handled to make it available for other uses, such as plant feeds or fuels. Carbon footprint and plant physical size are important physical considerations.
  • Negatively impacting the environment and its neighbors with its carbon footprint, odors, and other unpleasantness. A good way to help people in the community see the positive benefits of the plant is to invite site visits
  • Requiring excessive energy. A good WWTP design must be energy-efficient.

How to Meet These Needs

Examine the lists we’ve considered in the earlier sections as factors in WWTP design. A clever design will be needed to avoid violating some factors while complying with others. This demands experienced and skillful water engineers to design an eco-friendly wastewater treatment process.

If they tackle this task manually, without purpose-developed automated software, it can take several weeks or months to turn out a design. If a client wants to consider several options, multiply that delay.

At Transcend Water, the wastewater engineers have become computer programmers.

Employing the combination of their engineering and computer expertise, they’ve created the SaaS application Transcend Design Generator (TDG). With this versatile piece of software, a client engineer can develop a conceptual design in as little as 8 hours.

Employing this tool, project developers can keep critical projects on track for timely initiation. Timing is an important consideration since every wastewater treatment plant is a “rush” project. By using the TDG. a designer can offer the client multiple options to consider without delaying the project, and the TDG can accommodate any desired changes quickly and easily. It’s like using a spreadsheet,.instead of a series of manual calculations, for complex financial decision-making.

The TDG is a major boon to the wastewater management industry. Its like it has never been seen before. Many of the world’s largest water companies are using it.

To summarize, traditional clean-water sources in many areas are non-existent or inadequate for human and other needs. Lakes and other waterways are fouled with untreated wastewater. A WWTP is a true life-saver. Transcend’s TDG is the tool that can get a treatment project underway efficiently and quickly. This program has catapulted Transcend Water to a position of leadership in wastewater treatment process design.

Learn more here. Each page on this site has a contact button so you can get in touch with Transcend’s experts and find out how their software can benefit your project.