Abstract
Stormwater quality management has become an increasingly important topic. Pollutants from construction, urban, and agricultural runoff sources create adverse water quality impacts to receiving water bodies. Among these sources, suspended sediment has a significant influence on water quality and further acts as a media for transporting pollutants. Current stormwater treatment practices remove large, rapidly settable, soil particles; however, fine soil particles tend to remain suspended and contribute to elevated turbidity conditions. A need exists for an economical and passive treatment mechanism for the removal of suspended solids. Lamella settlers have been shown to enhance soil particle capture by increasing surface area and reducing settling distance. The objective of this research was to identify and optimize design configurations for a lamella settler system in treating a variety of synthetic soils. Five types of synthetic soils suspended in simulated stormwater at 500, 1000, and 5000 mg/L concentration were treated using system configurations of three lamella settler reactors at 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5-h residence times. Statistical analyses through a full factorial method followed with a regression analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA) test suggested that there was a significant difference exists between these experimental variables and turbidity levels. An optimized lamella settler reactor providing 1.8 cm (0.7 in.) settling space with 1.5-h residence time reduced turbidity by up to 90% when compared to a control reactor without lamella plates and a 0.5-h residence time. In addition, particle size distribution analysis indicated a decrease in the D90 by up to 84%, which showed that the optimized reactor was effective in capturing larger diameter soil particles.
Highlights
Stormwater quality has become an increasingly important topic across the agricultural, urban, and construction sectors [1]
It was found that the averaged turbidity removal rates at the outflow increased from 10.1% in RA to 81.7% in RC with the longest residence time (1.5 h), where 5859 NTU to 1219 NTU (79.2%) for Soil A, 5610 NTU to 756 NTU (86.5%)
Soil D had the greatest amount of silt (90%) compared to other soils, which can explain why it obtained the greatest turbidity reduction rates compared to other samples
Summary
Stormwater quality has become an increasingly important topic across the agricultural, urban, and construction sectors [1]. Construction sites, in particular, have the potential to create the greatest sources of sediment pollutants that can have profound impacts on the downstream environment [2]. Compared to other land uses, construction operations produce a large amount of sediment yield due to earth disturbing activities. Pollutants carried by soil particles (i.e., nutrients, heavy metals, petrochemicals, etc.) create adverse water quality impacts to downstream receiving water bodies [3]. Sediment-laden stormwater runoff can contribute to turbidity plumes, which impact biological structure, ecological functions, and biotic diversity [4,5]. To minimize these impacts, stormwater is managed through the use of passive “best management practices” (BMPs)
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