Model tools for modeling wastewater treatment process

Dear colleagues,

I am wondering whether current SWMM or future SWMM can be used to model biological kinetics in the sewer collection system. I am interested in knowing how to model the time history of BOD and TSS in sewer system before reaching a treatment plant?

Secondary, I know for sewers, SWMM is the "must-use" tool. What public-domain modeling tool do most North American engineers use for modeling wastewater treatment plants?? Has USA EPA approved or developed modeling tools for the treatment processes??

Thank you very much all in advance. Any suggestions or commented will be deeply appreciated.

Yao Lan
Yao.HungLan@GVRD.BC.CA

TransWQ is basically an alpha-version (hardly even beta) of the Transport Block that simulates linked BOD-NOD-DO in Transport Block channel elements. It is part of SWMM4.4h, and documentation is included in the zip file: transwq.zip. You are welcome to try it.

However, travel times are so short in a sewer system and the flow is relatively well aerated, so that first-order decay of unlinked quality parameters (available in the Runoff and Transport Blocks) is probably sufficient.

Wayne Huber
wayne.huber@ORST.EDU

[kvernes]

>What public-domain modeling tool do most North American >engineers use for modeling wastewater treatment plants??

I don't believe there is any recent public domain wastewater plant design software. You will need to consider a commercial system, and that will depend on your plant requirements.

Check out GPX, Biowin and SASSPro. SASSPro is the best starting point, as you will need training on GPX and Biowin to get up to speed with them.

[bendel_boy]

You should also add STOAT (stoat@wrcplc.co.uk) and WEST (www.hemmis.be) to your list. Ypu may also want to look at SIMBA, which runs under Matlab/Simulin - try www.ifak.de. These are dynamic models, as are GPS-X and Biowin. SASSPro is simpler and when I last saw it was steady-state, but may have since added dynamic capabilities.

For steady-state modelling you can also consider Plan-It STOAT (stoat@wrcplc.co.uk).

Although not public domain there is the free activated-sludge only program SSSP available at Vlemson - I don't have the web reference, but a searcg on SSSP should find it.

Finally, there is a 'public domain' (actually, GPL) program, SeTS - this runs under SciLab/Scicos. Again, I don't have a web reference for it - I usually relocate it when I am interested by searching for SeTS + SIMBA + GPS-X.

Finally, if you want to roll your own, look for Ascend IV - this gives you a flowsheet solver, but you have to ad your own unit models.