Modeling of water quality for water treatment plant effectiveness

Abstract

The modelling and computer simulation of quality of water from a municipal water treatment plant was carried out to determine the effectiveness of the plant. This was done by analyzing the raw water and treated water through collation of data when the plant was operated as designed; development and simulation of models using multiple regression analysis was done usingr Microsoft Excel 2007. In developing a model equation, pH was made the dependent variable while the other parameters of water quality were made independent variables such as turbidity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, total hardness, total alkalinity, organic matter and chloride ion. The range of the work was based on the raw water and treated water from the plant for a period of two years, i.e. from January - December 2001, for the production of model equation, and January - December 2000, for the model equation test of the predicted value, respectively. The results showed that the models represented the data with impressive correlation coefficients of 0.99027and 0.99091 respectively. It was also observed that in the two models organic matter and dissolved oxygen were the most significant parameters. These showed that all the models were well correlated and the treated water was assessed to be within the acceptable limits of the World Health Organization’s (W.H.O) Standards for drinking water, thus the models developed can be used to determine water treatment plant effectiveness.