Several Small or Single Large? Quantifying the Catchment-Wide Performance of On-Site Wastewater Treatment Plants with Inaccurate Sensors

Mariane Yvonne Schneider, Hidenori Harada, Kris Villez, Max Maurer

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

On-site wastewater treatment plants (OSTs) often lack monitoring, resulting in unreliable treatment performance. They thus appear to be a stopgap solution despite their potential contribution to circular water management. Low-maintenance but inaccurate soft sensors are emerging that address this concern. However, how their inaccuracy impacts the catchment-wide treatment performance of a system of many OSTs has not been quantified. We develop a stochastic model to estimate catchment-wide OST performances with a Monte Carlo simulation. In our study, soft sensors with a 70% accuracy improved the treatment performance from 66% of the time functional to 98%. Soft sensors optimized for specificity, indicating the true negative rate, improve the system performance, while sensors optimized for sensitivity, indicating the true positive rate, quantify the treatment performance more accurately. This new insight leads us to suggest programming two soft sensors in practical settings with the same hardware sensor data as input: one soft sensor geared to high specificity for maintenance scheduling and one geared to high sensitivity for performance quantification. Our findings suggest that a maintenance strategy combining inaccurate sensors with appropriate alarm management can vastly improve the mean catchment-wide treatment performance of a system of OSTs.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1114-1122
Number of pages9
JournalEnvironmental Science and Technology
Volume57
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 17 2023

Funding

M.Y.S. received funding from the Japanese Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grants GR19105 and P20763. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ). An earlier version of this manuscript has been published in the PhD thesis “Monitoring and quantifying the treatment performance of on-site wastewater treatment plants” and as a preprint.

Keywords

  • WRRF
  • parameter optimization
  • sensor-based maintenance
  • soft sensors

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