Study of the Dilution of a chemical spill through tracer experiments in The Käppala Association's Sewerage Network, Stockholm
Abstract: Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) play a vital role in protecting the environment from much of the waste produced by humans. This includes not only human waste, but everything that makes its way into a sewerage system including greywater, stormwater, and potentially hazardous chemicals from, inter alia, chemical spills. The effects of a chemical spill if it enters a WWTP can be disastrous, resulting in the ineffective treatment of incoming water for prolonged periods of time (Söhr, 2014). This can lead to one of the dilemmas of urban wastewater systems, notably, whether it is more damaging to allow a chemical spill to bypass a WWTP, or to attempt to treat all or some of the spill and risk damaging the microbes working in the biological treatment processes (Schütze, 2002). In order to better inform policy makers and process engineers at WWTPs of which measures to take in the event of a spill, solute transport characteristics of a specific sewerage network must be defined. A series of tracer tests were performed along The Käppala Association’s northern sewerage network to determine these solute transport characteristics, notably the dispersion coefficient which strongly affects the level of dilution that occurs between the injection point and the inlet. A simple solute transport model, carried out in Excel, was created using the Advection-Dispersion Equation (ADE) and the Manning-Strickler equation to relate flow measurements to flow velocity. Results from the experiments show that a dispersion coefficient of 1.55m2/s appears to be applicable throughout the whole of the tunnel network. A depth dependent Manning-Strickler coefficient seems to describe the flow-velocity relationship, however, this method has not been validated. The ADE begins to lose accuracy in describing solute transport as the distance from the inlet and the number of pumping stations the plume goes through increases.
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