Six Donohue wastewater professionals will be sharing technical presentations as part of the Indiana Water Environment Association’s annual conference. Brief summaries of the presentations follow.
Total Nitrogen on the Horizon – Citizen Energy Group’s Belmont and Southport AWT Planning for Future Nitrogen Limits | Greg Garnes and Chris Kennedy (Citizens Energy Group)
This presentation summarizes the fate of total nitrogen in wastewater treatment and how it relates to current total nitrogen reporting requirements and future limits. Citizens Energy Group’s Belmont and Southport AWTs are planning to replace aeration equipment at the end of its service life. A case study at each plant serves as an example of how planning for aeration system improvements should consider future nitrogen limits and how biological systems may be configured and operated in the future.
SCADA Systems – Choosing Your Path Forward | Brady Bell
Hardware and software technology development is fast-paced and many wastewater facilities quickly find their current control systems outdated and not using the full benefits of recent developments. Many systems were developed in different phases, resulting in non-standardized and uncoordinated systems. This presentation will present a stepwise process towards evaluating your current controls and SCADA system and developing a plan for the future. Several recent case histories will be used to explain how this was done and the possibilities available to a facility manager.
Biosolids Drying to Eliminate Liquid Land Application | Michael Gerbitz
This presentation provides an overview of the journey that one Midwestern community faced related to land application site availability, status-quo capital improvements, future concerns for PFAS, and sustainable reuse of biogas and nutrients. The resulting system provides autonomous treatment of wastewater biosolids reusing existing structures and biogas and takes them another step forward towards managing future regulations.
Sustained 60 mgd for Consent Decree! | Katherine Merkle and Tory Irwin (City of Elkhart)
The City of Elkhart, Indiana has been working for several years on their combined sewer overflow (CSO) Long Term Control Plan (LTCP) as part of a consent decree, which ultimately requires an expansion to treat a sustained peak flow rate of 60 mgd. This presentation discusses the treatment options available to Elkhart to handle the peak wet weather flows and factors taken into consideration. It will also present how enhanced high rate treatment technologies, such as pile cloth media filtration, can produce a very high effluent quality that allows the facility to meet typical secondary treatment effluent characteristics during wet weather events and permit requirements for parameters such as TSS, BOD, ammonia, and TP.
When 1,000 psi Isn’t Enough | Richard Claus
Citizens Energy Group selected Donohue to evaluate and design four new sludge cake pumps. The existing hydraulic driven, dual piston pumps were capable of 1,000 psi maximum discharge line pressure with the existing 150 HP hydraulic power pack motors and convey dewatered sludge to the incinerators. With centrifuge dewatering in recent years, optimizing for higher solids content dewatered sludge cake is more easily achievable. The existing pumps were limited to approximately 27 percent maximum solids content sludge, with pipeline slip injection to the incinerators. The evaluation resulted in increasing hydraulic power pack motor horsepower to 200 HP to achieve line pressure up to 1,400 psi. The presentation will highlight the importance of close interaction between Donohue and plant O&M staff through several workshops during the evaluation and design, which resulted in many O&M improvements.
Improvements to Expand the Cheeney Creek WWTP and Unanticipated Obstacles | Steven Gress
The City of Fishers’ Cheeney Creek WWTP is a conventional activated sludge facility that needed an expansion due to rapid development and population growth and total phosphorus effluent limits. In addition to reviewing the improvements and how various project challenges were overcome, this presentation will address flow capacity performance improvements and the level of total nitrogen and biological phosphorus removal achieved after project completion.
Learn more at https://indianawea.org/annual-conference/