Speaking

The City of Akron was required by Consent Decree to install a Biological Chemically Enhanced Primary Treatment (BioCEPT) process at the Akron Water Reclamation Facility (WRF) and to conduct a full-scale Demonstration Study upon completion of construction. The Demonstration Study required extensive planning and preparation to have procedures in place to capture test data for twenty (20) wet-weather events that can occur at any time of the day or night. This presentation will discuss those planning efforts including the development of a Quality Assurance Project Plan (QAPP), detecting and responding to a wet-weather event, and coordination of operating and testing staff, couriers, and laboratories.

The presentation will then move into some of the noteworthy issues encountered during the testing including plant flow variability, back-to-back events, equipment issues and having to transport samples out of state, just to name a few. Much of the presentation will be dedicated to discussing the observed results from the Demonstration Study and the ability of the BioCEPT treatment process to achieve the equivalent of secondary treatment and its overall performance compared to the City’s traditional activated sludge secondary treatment process.

The City of Akron, Ohio, has a water distribution system that serves over 80,000 households, including many large industrial and commercial entities. Along with the water treatment plant, the large-diameter transmission mains that convey finished water into the distribution system are critical to the ongoing safe and reliable water delivery to customers. Recognizing the need to be a proactive steward for some of the large-diameter steel transmission mains, the City partnered with B&N to perform a non-destructive condition assessment of the transmission mains as a follow-up to a previous study performed by B&N in the 1980s.

The study encompassed the following large steel transmission mains:

• 24-inch cast iron pipe – 1955 – 5,600 ft
• 36-inch steel lockbar pipe – 1912 – 18,000 ft
• 48-inch steel lockbar pipe – 1917 – 18,000 ft

This presentation will focus on the history of the City’s large diameter forcemains and the collaborative effort between the City and B&N to document and assess the condition of the pipes, the resulting findings, and recommended improvements. The presenters will also describe the evaluation process for different inspection and analysis techniques available, looking at common methods and newer technologies. Inspection considerations will include both non-direct environmental and direct physical methods. The presentation will share many high-quality field pictures, which will help tell the story of these historic transmission mains.

Join Rob and Bill Marchand, PE, City of Akron engineer, to hear how this project scope was efficiently developed and performed, resulting in substantial savings to the original project budget and the acquisition of accurate data to enable well-founded decision-making for future improvements.