Los Angeles looks at $88.6 million upgrade
The City of Los Angeles has awarded Honeywell a 15-year, $88.6 million contract to overhaul the technology controlling its wastewater treatment system. The project will allow the city Bureau of Sanitation to replace the current control systems, some of which have been in place for two decades.
It will also enable the city to create a city- and network-wide integrated operation, simplifying how it operates and maintains the wastewater system and reducing environmental risks from aging infrastructure. The system capacity is 550 mgd and includes 6,700 miles of sewer lines that serve more than 4 million residential and commercial customers in Los Angeles and 29 other cities.
The Honeywell technology will allow the city to link its four main treatment plants with geographically dispersed pumping stations, enabling operators to control the entire system from a central location. It will enable the city to more effectively monitor pumping stations and collection facilities across a 500-square-mile service area.
The project will take seven years to complete, and Honeywell will provide support services for eight years after completion. “This overhaul will give us better effectiveness and efficiency to meet the city’s needs and improve its overall infrastructure for decades to come,” said Varouj Abkian, assistant director of the Bureau of Sanitation. “In addition, over the next decade we expect it to save tens of millions of dollars and generate much-needed high-paying jobs for our community.”
Besides streamlining wastewater operations, the company’s Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS) platform will reduce training requirements for department employees. A single-platform approach means operators only need to learn one system.
Miami Dade adds treatment capacity
WesTech Engineering has helped increase the treatment capacity at the Miami Dade (Fla.) South District Wastewater Treatment Plant by 60 mgd. The company supplied four new 195-foot-diameter clarifiers and retrofitted six more with the Clarifier Optimization Package (COP) design. All 10 clarifiers are now online.
Located in Miami, South District had a peak flow capacity of 225 mgd. The new clarifiers are part of an expansion that will increase peak flow capacity to 285 mgd to meet increased demand caused by regulatory requirements and population growth.
Stricter regulations require effluent from treatment plants to be upgraded to protect existing aquifers. The COP clarifier design offers capacity and efficiency improvements over conventional clarifiers.
“We have found that the COP clarifiers perform better than our old standard rake/no EDI style of clarifiers,” said Steve Kronheim, chief plant operator at Miami Dade. “Also, we are excited to see how the Dual-Gate EDI will perform at peak conditions as compared to the conventional scooped EDI. The incorporation of the spiral-bladed collection mechanism appears to provide a thicker underflow than delivered by our previous clarifiers.
“In the past, our RAS concentration was 7,000 to 9,000 mg/L, and now it is 9,000 to 11,000 mg/L. This saves us 20 to 30 percent on our RAS pumping and increases the capacity of our solids processing facility.”
Princeton, Minn., adds Hydrotech Discfilter
Kruger Inc., a Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies company, will furnish a 3.9 mgd Hydrotech Discfilter system for a wastewater treatment plant improvement project in Princeton, Minn. Two units will be installed for tertiary filtration to meet stringent total phosphorus limits for discharge to the Rum River. The system is to be operational in fall 2012.
Florida utilities select BioAir Solutions for odor control
Three municipal utilities in Florida have selected BioAir Solutions to supply technologies to remove odors from wastewater treatment facilities.
The City of Atlantic Beach chose the EcoPure unit to treat hydrogen sulfide and organic odors from a dewatering building. The unit combines the benefits of biotrickling filter technology with EcoSorb media for polishing.
Orange County Utilities will install a similar, smaller EcoPure unit at its Hunters Creek Pump Station in Orlando. The unit will draw odorous air from the pump station and maintain a slight vacuum in the headspace and gravity sewer upstream, so that no fugitive odors are released. The low-profile unit will be invisible to the community.
Pinellas County installed a pair of EcoPure Mini units to control odors at two wastewater pumping stations in Madera Beach. The installations are on a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico near high-end homes. The units maintain a slight negative pressure in wet well headspace to avoid escape of fugitive odors.
The BioAir systems are designed to remove more than 99.9 percent of the hydrogen sulfide and reduce overall odors by more than 95 percent.
Cincinnati adopts FlowWorks to manage environmental data
The City of Cincinnati will move its environmental monitoring data onto the FlowWorks Web platform for secure storage, editing and analysis.
ADS and FlowWorks are partnering to provide the city with flow services for capital improvement and other modeling projects. Included are flow servicing, data management and QA/QC for more than 200 monitoring stations. The data is being uploaded to FlowWorks, where it will be combined with other environmental data, including historic data from flow metering stations, rain gauges and SCADA pump stations, and from CSO and SSO sites.
