Advection and dispersion of solutes in sewer systems: verification of water quality models by tracer experiments

摘要

Solute transport is one of the key processes with respect to predicting the soluble and fine suspended pollutant load discharged via combined sewer overflows (CSOs) and transported towards wastewater treatment plants (wwtps). This paper discusses the quality of available models for the transport of solutes in sewer systems. A number of tracer experiments and a 10 day measuring campaign provided the data to first check the validity of the well-known 1D advection -dispersion equation and subsequently the performance of two commercial software packages. Although commercial software packages show significant numerical dispersion, they can be used to properly model the transport of a soluble substance like ammonium during storm events, provided that the hydrodynamics are well known.