Lee County Utilities
Fort Myers, Florida
Implementing a comprehensive asset management program with the traditional planning, design,
and implementation phases can typically take three to five years and cost millions of dollars.
Lee County Utilities (LCU) was determined to implement a comprehensive asset management
program to improve the management of their over $700 million dollars worth of assets but didn’t
want to wait over three years to see any meaningful results and wanted to minimize the costs as
much as possible. Because of this, Malcolm Pirnie and LCU formulated a fast track approach
that would complete the planning and design of the program in less than a year, would focus
solely on a small portion of the system, Waterway Estates, and would fully evaluate the small
pilot area in terms of asset condition, criticality, risk, renewal and replacement funding, and
potential rate impacts. This paper will outline in detail the pilot area approach steps and benefits.
Metric Used:
Posted: May 20th, 2011 | Filed under: 100K-500K, Stormwater, Waste Water Treatment, Water Treatment | Tags: Cost Savings, Improved Team Work, Improved Worker Morale, Organizational Sustainability, Plant Sustainability, Time Savings | No Comments »
Over one thousand wastewater dischargers in the US are required to monitor Total Kjeldahl Nitrogen (TKN) and report results to regulatory agencies. The typical TKN procedure consists of heating a mixture for several hours with strong acid and hazardous materials, manually adding strong base to strong acid, followed by a distillation and quantitative measurement of an analyte. TKN is one of the most challenging, dangerous and labor intensive tests performed at wastewater treatment plants. The s-TKN method changes this, allowing any laboratory to quickly and easily run the test. Equally important, the s-TKN method does not suffer from the same performance limitations as the traditional TKN test, particularly with documented nitrate interference. Not only does this allow for more frequent and accurate testing for process control purposes, but the methodology is intrinsically safer for operators to perform, and eliminates hazardous reagents and waste such as mercury. Benefits of the s-TKN may be summarized as:
• Green chemistry – Less hazardous
• Simplicity
• Comparable performance to other reference methods
• Speed of analysis
• Low cost
• Does not suffer from nitrate interference
The primary goal of this project was to develop a green alternative analysis system for TKN that provides comparable analytical results while using significantly less hazardous reagents. In addition, the method must be simple enough for use by current wastewater treatment plant staff with the potential to significantly reduce expenditure of time and analysis costs. Source: WEFTEC 2009 Proceedings
Metric Used:
Posted: August 27th, 2010 | Filed under: Waste Water Treatment | Tags: Cost Savings, Ease of Use, Environmental Impact, Time Savings | No Comments »
Pinellas County Utilities William E. Dunn Water Reclamation Facility
Palm Harbor, Florida
Automated control of a facility is often one of the principal improvements desired to ease demands placed on operators. Plant personnel are required to maintain processes within governed parameters that in conjunction with increasingly smaller staff numbers can present challenges. One challenge encountered frequently with plant personnel is the aversion to change and use of new technologies. This problem was clearly evident in the early stages of construction where formally manually operated processes were switched back into manual control after being fully automated and switched into auto mode. This issue was due mainly to thoughts that “people” jobs were being replaced with computers. Pinellas County constantly monitors the condition of the plants and the staff’s abilities to maintain the condition. The installation of a fully automated system not only is a valuable tool in maintaining control over the processes it allows the Operator to view the entire plant processes. The result is time savings, more efficient use of chemicals and other consumables, and improved maintenance capabilities. The use of the new automated system employed for this project has resulted in the following new abilities of plant operators:
• Through the use of trend charting provided by the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC),
• What/If scenarios can be presented to determine possible outcomes, maximize plant performance, and trouble shoot processes.
• Polymer usage versus sludge feed rates can be optimized to provide cost benefits.
• Operators were provided handheld Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) which allowed both monitoring and operating the entire plant from any point in the facility.
• During second and third shifts this tool has allowed operators to respond to emergencies with greater efficiency. Source: WEFTEC 2009 Proceedings
Metric Used:
Posted: August 27th, 2010 | Filed under: 100K-500K, Waste Water Treatment | Tags: Cost Savings, Faster Emergency Response, Improved Maintenance, Improved Troubleshooting, Maximized Plant Performance, Plant Optimization, Time Savings | No Comments »
Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility
Washington, DC
“We agree that automation works at other locations, it just won’t work here.” This was the sentiment predicting the success of the automatic process control at the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority’s (WASA) 370 MGD Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment facility during the start of the Process Control System (PCS) automation program. This pessimism was broadly believed because of previous automation disappointments that spanned from the 1970s up until the late 1990s. Much has changed since that statement was made more than a decade ago, and this paper lists the challenges that the project faced and how they were successfully overcome to make this implementation successful and convert the naysayers into champions of the PCS. Source: WEFTEC 2009 Proceedings
Metric Used:
Posted: August 27th, 2010 | Filed under: 100K-500K, Waste Water Treatment | Tags: Cost Savings, Faster Emergency Response, Improved Maintenance, Improved Troubleshooting, Maximized Plant Performance, Plant Optimization, Time Savings | No Comments »