Stochastic forecasting of specific substances in sewer systems
Today more than 100'000 chemical compounds are on the market in
Europe. A part of these products go "down-the-drain" and enter the canalization.
The goal of this work is to make a prediction of a substance's concentration at
any point in the sewer system (e.g. at the inflow to a waste water treatment
plant).
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The focus is primarily on household chemicals: products used for
personal hygiene, washing, cleaning, medication etc. Besides the information on
substances data from two more system components is required: i) sewer network
and ii) population. Particular attention will be devoted to the following
aspects, questions respectively:
| • | Potential of existing data: What information is available? |
| • | Level of detail: Temporal and spatial resolution, what degree of generalization is possible without loosing too much information? |
| • | Identifying Uncertainties: While developing the method, high emphasis will be put on quantifying the effects of uncertainty on the forecast. |
| • | Transport and transformation: What are the dominant processes which need to be considered? |
| • | Abstraction: How should activities be characterized in order to describe classes of sources? |
The benefit of the described PhD project is to gain an
understanding of a substance's occurrence, without conducting expensive
measuring campaigns. After the model's validation it can also be applied as a
screening tool to provide a forecast for future scenarios, new substances which
will be introduced to the market.
Contact
Christoph
Ort, Personal
homepage
Prof. Dr. Willi Gujer
Project leader
Prof. Dr. Willi Gujer
Support
ETH / Eawag