Abstract
Wastewater from municipal and industrial sources is becoming increasingly important in being reused, for example, for irrigation purposes. Wastewater is commonly stored in treatment lagoons in which evaporation is the main cause of water loss. Nonetheless, modeling wastewater evaporation (WWE) has received little attention. Driven by this knowledge gap, this study was performed to explore extent to which impurities affect water evaporation. A dimensional analysis was used to formulate WWE as a function of clear water evaporation (CWE), wastewater properties and climatic variables. We based our modeling approach on experimental data collected from the Neishaboor municipal wastewater treatment plant, Iran. As a result of this analysis, a multiplicative model to formulate WWE as a function of the influencing variables is proposed which indicated a reasonably well accuracy (RMSE = 1.09 mm) for the WWE estimation. Clear water evaporation indicated to be the most correlated variable in the model such that a constant coefficient can also be used to estimate WWE from CWE at the cost of losing accuracy only by 4.6 %.
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Acknowledgments
Authors would like to thank the “Khorasan-Razavi Water and Wastewater Company” for the financial support. We also wish to acknowledge the “Neishaboor Water and Wastewater Company” and “Neishaboor municipal wastewater treatment plant” to set-up class A pans and measuring daily wastewater parameters.
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Izady, A., Abdalla, O., Sadeghi, M. et al. A Novel Approach to Modeling Wastewater Evaporation Based on Dimensional Analysis. Water Resour Manage 30, 2801–2814 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-016-1324-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-016-1324-8