Application of 2D surface ERT to on-site wastewater treatment survey

Abstract

Abstract Interest in the functioning of on-site wastewater treatment in rural areas has grown both among authorities and private companies in France and elsewhere in Europe. This is partly due to the enforcement of a new law that obliges communities to control on-site wastewater treatment systems. For extensive systems—mostly Vertical Flow Sand Filters (VFSF)—the introduction of this law revealed the absence of reliable methods to assess if a system was built according to recommendations and is operating well. The aim of this paper is to examine whether surface Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) is a reliable method for mapping outline of filter dimensions and reveal clogging effects. Using forward modeling of synthetic models, we created sensitivity maps of ideal resistivity maps revealing that the method is well-suited to outline the horizontal extent of the filter but not necessarily its constitutive layers because the coarse gravel layer near the surface reduces the sensitivity to features below this layer. Hence whatever the geophysical signal is produced by clogging, this will be difficult to detect. The most appropriate inversion procedure, i.e. the L 1 -norm inversion, reveals the filter extent with an error less than the electrode spacing independent of noise levels. Finally, the procedure is illustrated for a real case ERT survey on a full scale VFSF. This study reveals that simple surface ERT measurements provide a good estimate of the filter area, but additional methods are required for more detailed vertical analysis including potential detection of clogging effects.