Reducing hydraulic short-circuiting in maturation ponds to maximize pathogen removal using channels and wind breaks

This paper reports the impact of four sequential maturation pond interventions on the removal of thermotolerant "faecal" coliform bacteria at a full scale WSP system in tropical Colombia. Each intervention was designed to increase hydraulic retention time and was followed by continuous physico-chemical logging and meteorological monitoring, and simultaneous tracer studies to define hydraulic retention time, flow paths and dispersion. Inlet and outlet monitoring showed that, primarily due to hydraulic short-circuiting, the open maturation pond only achieved a 90% reduction in thermotolerant "faecal" coliforms. By contrast, an in-pond batch decay rate study for thermotolerant faecal coliforms showed that a 1 log (90%) reduction was achieved every 24 hours for 4 days at 26 degrees C, so that the maximum theoretical efficiency would be a 2.6 log reduction (99.7%) if hydraulic efficiency was perfect for plug flow. The second intervention was the conversion of the maturation pond to a parallel series of three open channels to attempt to control short-circuiting and convert to plug flow. The channels raised performance to 96%. The introduction of top baffles, at the end of the first and second channels, to attempt to further reduce the effect of surface and sub-surface flow on short-circuiting, actually reduced performance to 92.64%, and were removed. The final intervention, a 2.1 m high wind break around the maturation channels raised efficiency to 98.13%; this performance is almost a half log (0.47) greater than the efficiency (95.1%) predicted from Marais' equation for a completely mixed reactor, and 0.77 log greater than recorded in the open pond. The results have fundamental implications for improving WSP efficiency, for meeting re-use guidelines, for savings in land area and improvement of design of WSPs; they also highlight short-comings in the indiscriminate use of the Marais design equation for faecal coliform removal.