Assessment of Treatment Plant Performance and Water Quality Data: A Guide for Students, Researchers and Practitioners

Assessment of Treatment Plant Performance and Water Quality Data provides practical indications on how to undertake performance evaluation of water and wastewater treatment units, processes, and plants, using math and statistics as a tool. The objective is to approach the concepts based on the needs and challenges associated with treatment plant performance evaluation, and to use simple language to describe the mathematical calculations and statistical analyses that can be used for this purpose.

Written primarily for graduate level students, the concepts and applications will be presented from practice to theory in a simplified and practical way, thus making the book equally beneficial to practitioners and policy-makers, who may have a limited background in math and statistics.  Postdoctoral scientists and professors will also find it useful if they are involved in research projects that comprise the assessment of treatment performance.

Introduction; Flow data; Sampling for water constituents; Laboratory analysis of water constituents; Loading rates; Descriptive statistics of flows, concentrations and loads; Frequency distribution of flows, concentrations and loads; Removal efficiencies; Compliance with discharge standards or targets for the effluent; Reliability analysis of treatment performance; Quality control for assessing treatment plant performance; Making comparisons between systems and operational phases; Influence of operational conditions on treatment performance; Reaction kinetics and reactor hydraulics; Assessment of the goodness-of-fit of mathematical models for the estimation of treatment performance.