Wastewater treatment plants are expected to offer consistent performance over a long period of time, but they witness heavy usage. Additionally, setting up a new wastewater treatment plant often entails high Capex.
Going by the standards in the developed countries, a typical wastewater treatment plant lasts for 40 years while certain other water treatment equipment within the plant could survive for 15-20 years. Due to these factors, many industrial facilities choose to keep their older wastewater treatment plants in operation. In such cases, a few simple measures can help the users increase the lifespan of older wastewater treatment plants while reducing the rate of degradation in their performance with time.
3 simple ways to increase the lifespan and service period of your wastewater treatment plant
Avoid overloads
Overloading means having a more-than-expected inflow of water into the wastewater treatment plant. Overloading could cause many critical components of the wastewater treatment plant to wear out and fail prematurely.
Overloading could occur due to 2 key reasons
The wastewater treatment plant is undersized
A wastewater treatment plant is built to stay operational for many decades. Thus, it is possible that a WWTP set up in 1990 could still be operational today. However, with time, the industrial facility must have increased its production, and the wastewater treatment plant must now process more volume than what it was designed to handle. Result: the plant gets overloaded, and witnesses increased wear and tear, thus reducing its lifespan.
Lack of oxygen in the system
With time, the efficiency of components such as lowers could be reduced. This means the blowers are now supplying less than required air. The lack of oxygen and air could throw the entire biological water treatment process out of balance, and cause the plant to overload. Additionally, the blowers must now work extra hard and undergo more wear to supply the required amount of air.
Retrofitting the existing wastewater treatment plant with the latest filtration technologies could help prevent the overloading of the plant. With environmental norms becoming more stringent, adopting new technologies and more efficient water treatment plant is no longer an option. However, constraints on space or budget may make it difficult to buy new plants. In such cases, retrofitting could ensure improved efficiency and compliance for older plants. Depending on the quality of retrofits, it could buy you many years of time till a new plant must ultimately be procured.
Explore the benefits of retrofitting wastewater treatment plants
Embrace automation
In 2018, an employee at a water treatment plant in Austin, Texas failed to notice an error in the plant’s functioning. As a result, the city authorities had to issue a “boil water notice” for the entire city as the drinking water supply was contaminated. A boil-water advisory is when a government authority advises residents to use only boiled water or bottled water for consumption because of serious contamination in the traditional drinking water sources.
While automation of WWTPs is a growing trend, many older wastewater treatment plants are manually operated. In such cases, there is a higher possibility of human error. Besides financial losses and loss of water quality, such instances of failure could have serious environmental and social consequences.
Choose better maintenance practices
Regular maintenance of the wastewater treatment plant can increase the plant’s lifespan by at least 5 years. Here, there is a distinction to be made between scheduled maintenance and data-driven maintenance. Scheduled maintenance involves inspection and repairs of the plant at regular intervals. In such an action, key components of the plant are often replaced at regular intervals whether they are damaged or not.
However, do note that not all components fail or need replacement at the same time. Replacing a perfectly functioning component just because you need to follow the maintenance schedule will unnecessarily increase the maintenance cost. Data-driven maintenance practices could help reduce such costs.
Smart technologies such as digital twinning are helping companies collect, analyze and use data for data-driven maintenance. In the long run, digitalization of the WWTP enables tailored predictive maintenance which enhances plant reliability while significantly cutting the downtime and maintenance costs and increasing the plant’s lifespan.
Explore the benefits of digitalizing your wastewater treatment plant
Inovar offers fully digitalized automatic as well as semi-automatic wastewater treatment plans of any desired capacity and customization. Additionally, all Inovar water treatment plants are backed by Annual Maintenance Contracts in order to save your STP maintenance costs over time.