Small Water Distribution System Operations and Disinfection By Product Fate

Copyright © 2013 Sandhya Rao Poleneni, Enos C. Inniss. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Stage-2 Disinfectant and Disinfection By-Product (D/DBP) regulations force water utilities to be more concerned with their finished and distributed water quality. Compliance requires changes to their current operational strategy, which affect the formation of DBPs over time. This study quantifies changes in DBP formation and chlorine decay ki-netics under different operational conditions and pipe materials found at many small-scale water utilities. A physical model (Pipe Loop) of a distribution system was used to evaluate the change in water quality from conditions such as having a high chlorine dosage entering the distribution system, using a chlorine booster system in the distribution sys-tem, and operation of clearwells/storage tanks. The High Chlorine Run (HC) is least favorable option with approxi-mately 64 % and 30 % higher TTHMs than Normal Run (NR) and Chlorine Booster Run (CB), respectively. High Chlo-rine conditions also minimize the wall effects. The location of Boosters should always be after the storage systems to avoid extra contact time that can produce approximately 23 %- 78 % higher TTHMs. The following trends are discov-ered from the data analysis: Chlorine residual HC> CB> NR and TTHM NR> CB> HC