Wastewater Capacity Analysis

Wastewater capacity analysis has always been critical to owners and designers. With several years of experience, we at Wedotanks help you assess when and how to augment a plant to fulfill the growing load and effluent quality demands.

The capacity analysis of a wastewater treatment plant includes assessing the complex function of several factors, such as:

  • Existing and proposed infrastructure available to a community
  • Physical constraints, like tank volumes, equipment capacity, etc.
  • Operational factors like sludge age, recycle rates
  • License constraints

Capacity analysis for wastewater system is an additional step which is done to evaluate the ability to meet the current and future demands of the wastewater treatment.

The actual operating capacity of a wastewater treatment plant varies from the original design capacity. To calculate the actual capacity of the plant by incorporating all the factors is still a challenging problem. Earlier, the capacities of the treatment plant were defined and decided in terms of hydraulic load, mass load of carbon, population equivalent, etc. Though these factors are useful for planning purpose, they don’t include design assumption, influent variability, operating conditions or license standards.

The hindrance in verifying the wastewater capacity comes in the inconsistency and unpredictability of the parameters that define a plant’s capacity. For example, COD concentration or flow rate may follow a predictable pattern but differ on daily basis. Some factors, like rainfall, give rise to short-term fluctuations.

Wedotanks take account of multiple factors and parameters including its variability to assess the wastewater capacity. We adopt a deterministic approach to establish the capacity of a plant. For most plants, we start by identifying two distinct capacities:

  • Hydraulic capacity – It refers to a plant’s ability to maintain a given flow rate. It is determined by pressure difference through various treatment stages.
  • Process capacity – It includes the inherent variability of the influent and the process.

Our deterministic method targets a treatment plant’s historical database to evaluate daily average influent conditions, operating regime, and behavioral properties.

You can always trust Wedotanks for wastewater capacity analysis.

For any further information, you can always reach us at 866-374-2083.