Exploring the use of water resource recovery facility instrument data to visualise dynamic resilience to environmental stressors

Water resource recovery facilities (WRRF) face increasingly dynamic stressors, such as higher rainfall intensity and extended dry periods, which can exert stress on ageing water infrastructure and processes. These events can generate process stresses, which lead to wastewater process failures which result in pollution events that could be identified from instrument data used for operational/compliance monitoring. This extraction can be performed on two levels (1) for discrete processes that generate data to monitor process control variables and (2) at the WRRF process boundary (global), which is mainly used for compliance. Both levels of data hold valuable information on the dynamic influence of environmental stressors (cause) and the resulting process stress or resilience (effect) as 'dynamic resilience'. This paper proposes a novel methodology that uses actual water company instrument data to evaluate the 'discrete' (unit processes) and 'global' (WRRF boundary) dynamic resilience of a WRRF in the south of the UK. Dynamic resilience is presented as a four-stage methodology, which; (1) cleans WRRF data and extracts a standard operating condition; (2) identifies dynamic high and low flow environmental stressor events (one in five years); (3) models the process stresses and resilience generated by the imposed dynamic stressor before; (4) generating a contoured heat map of process-related stresses or resilience as a self ordering window. These methods demonstrate the possibility of visualising the dynamics of WRRF resilience (dynamic stressors and process stresses/resilience) resulting from high and low flow dynamic environmental stressors. Despite some challenges experienced with self ordering window scaling, the results demonstrate the possibility of identifying zones of process stress and resilience. It may also be possible to expand the methods developed to incorporate storm flows and combined sewer discharges.

A conceptual framework for a multi-criteria decision support tool to select technologies for resource recovery from urban wastewater

In the context of circular economy, wastewater can be used to address some of the 21st century's challenges regarding the transition to renewable resources for water, energy, and nutrients. Despite all the research, development, and experience with resource recovery from urban wastewater, its implementation is still limited. The transition from treatment to resource recovery is complex due to the difficulty of selecting unit processes from a large number of candidate processes considering the operational limitations of each process, and sustainability objectives. Presently, a multi-criteria decision support tool that deals with the difficulty of unit process selection for resource recovery from wastewater has not been developed. Therefore, this paper presents the conceptual framework of a decision support tool to find the optimum treatment train consisting of compatible unit processes which can recover water, energy and/or nutrients from a specified influent composition. The framework presents the relationship between the user input, the knowledge library of technologies and a weighted multi-objective nonlinear programming model to aid process selection. The model presented here shows, not only how the processes are selected, but also the four-dimensional sustainability impact of the generated treatment train while considering the weight provided by the user. Thus, this study presents a reproducible framework which can support private and public decision-makers in transparent evidence-based decision making and eventually the systematic implementation of resource recovery from urban wastewater.

Mathematically formulated key performance indicators for design and evaluation of treatment trains for resource recovery from urban wastewater

While urban wastewater infrastructure is aging and no longer adequate, climate change and sustainability are urging the transition from pollution management to resource recovery. Lacking evidence-based quantitative evaluation of the potential benefits and consequences of resource recovery from wastewater hinders the negotiation amongst stakeholders and slows down the transition. This study proposes mathematical formulations for technical, environmental, economic, and social key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to quantify the benefits and the risks of resource recovery. The proposed formulations are derived from the literature and validated with stakeholders. Each KPI is mathematically formulated at treatment train level by considering: (1) the characteristics of individual unit processes (UPs) in the treatment train (TT), (2) the context in which the TT is installed, and (3) the resources to be recovered. The mathematical formulations of the KPIs proposed in this study enable a transparent, consistent and informative evaluation of existing treatment trains, as well as support the (computer aided) design of new ones. This could aid the transition from urban wastewater treatment to resource recovery from urban wastewater.

Optimal spare parts management for vessel maintenance scheduling

Condition-based monitoring is used as part of predictive maintenance to collect real-time information on the healthy status of a vessel engine, which allows for a more accurate estimation of the remaining life of an engine or its parts, as well as providing a warning for a potential failure of an engine part. An engine failure results in delays and down-times in the voyage of a vessel, which translates into additional cost and penalties. This paper studies a spare part management problem for maintenance scheduling of a vessel operating on a given route that is defined by a sequence of port visits. When a warning on part failure is received, the problem decides when and to which port each part should be ordered, where the latter is also the location at which the maintenance operation would be performed. The paper describes a mathematical programming model of the problem, as well as a shortest path dynamic programming formulation for a single part which solves the problem in polynomial time complexity. Simulation results are presented in which the models are tested under different scenarios.