Daily influent variation for dynamic modeling of wastewater treatment plants

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) with activated sludge system are widely used throughout the most common technologies in the world. Most treatment plants require optimization of certain treatment processes using dynamic modeling. A lot of examples of dynamic simulations require reliable data base of diurnal variation of the inflow and typical concentrations of parameters such as Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Total Kjeldahl Nitrogen (TKN), etc. Such detailed data are not available, which leads to problems in the application of dynamic simulations. In many examples of plants, continuous flow measurements are only performed after the primary clarifier, whereas measurements from influent to the plant are missing, as is the case with the examples in this paper. In some cases, a simpler, faster and cheaper way can be applied to determine influent variations, such as the ,,HSG-Sim'' method (''Hochschulgruppe Simulation''). ''Hochschulgruppe Simulation'' is a group of researchers from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Poland (see http://www hsgsim org). This paper presents a model for generating daily variations of inflow and concentration of municipal wastewater quality parameters, applied to several existing WWTPs in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H). The main goal of the applied method is to generate realistic influent data of the existing plants in B&H, in terms of flow and quality, without any prior comprehensive survey and measurements at the site. The examples of plants show the influence of overflow facilities on the dynamics of input flow and quality of wastewater, and a strong influence of the problems of the sewerage systems.