Impacts of water demand management on sewer resilience

Abstract

Sewers, which dispose our wastes and serve to protect our health and environment, are an integral component of our transition to a more water sustainable society. Sewers have the capacity to generate large quantities of hydrogen sulfide gas which is toxic, odorous, and highly destructive to concrete sewer infrastructure. Its generation, transport and loss in sewers is highly dependent on hydraulics and wastewater quality. There is the risk that improper implementation of water sustainable practices and infrastructure could have consequences for sewer resilience by increasing hydrogen sulfide concentrations, potentially costing tens of billions of dollars in remedial costs annually in Australia. For sustainable water practices to be successful, the impacts to sewers must be understood and accounted for. This thesis set out to identify the sections of sewer networks most vulnerable to upstream changes in water use based on changes to hydrogen sulfide generation, oxidation and mass transfer in pressure mains and gravity sewers. Fully quantifying the overall impacts to sewer I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material. Where appropriate I have obtained copyright permission from the copyright holder to reproduce material in this thesis and have sought permission from coauthors for any jointly authored works included in the thesis. V Publications during candidature Peer-reviewed papers, Shypanski A, Yuan Z, Sharma K. Influence of pressure main pumping frequency on sulfide formation rates in sanitary sewers.

Biotransformation of micropollutants in sewers

“…Point Innovation Centre Sewer pilotThe experimental full-scale sewer pipes are located in the Luggage Point STP in Brisbane and began operation in 2015. Two RM pipes (ø 100 mm) and two GS pipes (ø 300 mm) of 300 m length each were inoculated and the mature biofilms maintained with wastewater from the STP inlet 89. Schematic representations of both setups can be found in the appendix(Figure 8-4andFigure 8-5).…”