Performance of water treatment plant elements

Potable water treatment is one of the most challenging and complex systems that municipalities need to deal with considering limited resources. The average age of continuously deteriorating Canadian water supply system was 36 years and that would require 3.1 billion dollar to bring the system at satisfactory level. Operators have little attention to plant infrastructure and equipment compared to water quality and day-to-day operational activities. Water treatment plant (WTP) includes several elements, such as tanks, basins and pumps. Essential condition parameters are selected including technical, physical, environmental, and operational aspects of WTP. Data on the WTP conditions are collected from experts and consultants in this domain. The targeted experts were operators, designers, consultants, regulators and researchers across Canada and few from abroad. To determine the condition index of a WTP element, value additive multi-attribute theory (MAUT) has been used where average weights and scores are considered. It is concluded that the average condition index for settling basin ranges from 9.6 (best scenarios) to 1.9 (worst scenarios) and from 9.6 to 3.4 for pumps of WTP. Analysis reveals that, for tank and basins, design and construction stage is the most important parameter to the WTP condition. On the contrary, operational parameter is the most important for pumps. The study also highlights durability issues and details in structural design as the most important parameters for future condition of tanks and basins. However, operation and maintenance practice are the most important parameters for pumps.