Software Tool Can Show if a City's WWTP Will Fail

Urban populations and megacities are on the rise and so is the amount of wastewater pouring into treatment facilities that cannot adequately handle the load. What if you had a tool that could tell whether a large wastewater treatment plant was capable of reliably meeting the demand? “It could avert a public health disaster caused by harmful water quality,” says University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee electrical engineer Lingfeng Wang, who has devised such a software tool. “For most public systems, there is no quantitative way to know whether operations are working until the output is insufficient." Instead of real-time monitoring of the equipment conditions, Wang’s software