Seoul Campus

5. Seoul’s Water Management

Date 2017-09-19 Writer ssunha
  • Water Management
  • PhD. Young-June Choi
  • 2017-09-19
Description: 


< MODULE 5 >

Although the city made much achievement in waterworks system, the city is also interested in the R&D for new technology for the future. The current research projects include the water reuse, rooftop rainwater retention system. Although the city has advanced water treatment process we are focusing on another advanced process called advanced oxidation process to treat the chemicals hard-to-treat with the conventional and advanced water treatment process.

And another research topic including the corrosion resistive materials for waterworks system, and direct drinking water supply system for high rising building. As we discussed before, these days we have more and more chemicals in our systems so we have plans to study the CECs, the chemicals of emerging concern including PPCPs, pharmaceuticals and personal care products, and EDCs, endocrine disrupting compounds, and radioactive materials.

And we have another project to operate and maintain the waterworks system efficiently using the asset management techniques. For the wastewater treatment, we have problems. The hot issue of the wastewater treatment process is total nitrogen and total phosphorus control in the effluent, so we have many projects to correspond to that problem with total nitrogen and total phosphorus.

Also we have focused on the resources and energy recovery, so we have research project for the phosphorus recovery from wastewater and also we have project for energy production from wastewater including biogas and wastewater heat.

As we discussed, we have combined sewer line and we have plan to do research on the optimal design of the CSO’s retention basin. And also the city led a nation R&D project called Safe Urban Drainage System. This photo was taken from one of the pilot plants for the advanced water treatment process called the GAC, granular activated carbon, and this column shows the filtration. So the size of the pilot plant is the largest in Korea.

And also we have another pilot plant for the corrosion control study, as we can see we have 50 meter of different pipe materials and we installed the treatment facilities where we can check the effect of the each system. And also we analyze the soil to control the outer corrosion of the pipelines. We just completed national R&D project called Eco-STAR project on the membrane filtration system.

And another research project that we completed recently is integrated remote metering system. In this integrated system, we integrated the three utilities at home such as gas, electricity, and water into one system, and then the data is transferred through the internet then we can check the data and information in real-time.

As a result of the research we got Project Innovation Award from International Waters Association in 2012. We have training programs for kids and parents about the water treatment processes, and during the session our staffs go out to the school to train and educate kids and sometimes we join the science event with the kids.

We have research interest for the future, which include integrated urban water management and distributed waterworks system and we wanted to predict the problems in advance such as drought, flood, and water quality change. And we are interested in the waterworks system with less chlorine, but at the same time we wanted to maintain the microbial safety with less chlorine, so we started a project to study ARB, antibiotic resistant bacteria.

We wanted to do research with leading-edge technologies such as IoT and big data. We wanted to make a smart system with IoT and big data.  And also we have programs to share our knowledge and experience with other cities through knowledge sharing program called the Seoul archive.

Although the city of Seoul made many achievements we still have many challenges. The challenges include climate change and new chemicals and energy issues. As for the climate change, the precipitation patterns changed much so the production of drinking water and wastewater treatment, and urban drainage system can have difficulties with the changing pattern of the precipitation.

And also the drought, flood and the problems caused by the climate changes became severe and frequent. And as the industry developed, we have more and more chemicals in our daily lives like pharmaceuticals, drugs, antibiotics and personal care products such as the shampoo and perfume.

Those chemicals can cause problems for our health or also make problems with the ecosystem, and these days these chemicals can make bacteria resistant to antibiotics, so we have problems with ARB, which stands for antibiotics resistance bacteria.

And energy is big issue these days so we wanted to produce more of renewable energy from the system, and also we wanted to increase the efficiency of the system to decrease the energy consumption.

As we discussed before, we have a large space in wastewater treatment plant and water treatment plant. This is the largest wastewater treatment plant in Seoul. The sedimentation basin is covered with photovoltaic panels, solar panels, to generate solar power.

This photo was taken from the water treatment plant. As waste water treatment plant, water treatment plant also has very large space so we wanted to use that space to install the solar panel to generate the solar power.

As a result of the installation, we have 11,000 kilowatts of solar power generation. One of the water treatment plants has elevation difference over 24 meters between the water treatment plant and the lowest reservoir so we could use that elevation difference to generate the small hydropower generation system.

This is installed in the lowest the reservoir so we could generate them using the small hydropower generation system. By 2016 we will install two small hydropower generation systems in our water treatment plant and reservoir and then we can generate some 680 kilowatts of power with the system.

Also we have a plan to use geothermal energy too. Another challenge is efficiency and energy issues, so we wanted to use big data to make the smart waterworks system. So we just started three research project using big data, one is a water meter freezing prediction system, the other is urban odor mapping system, the third one is soil corrosion mapping system.

So with these systems we can predict the problem in advance. This is the result of the first year of the project with water meter freezing mapping system. It’s one year so we have to accumulate more data for a long time to predict the water meter freezing but as we can see, we can find out which area is weak and vulnerable to the water freezing.

So with more accumulated data we can predict the water meter freezing in advance. Another issue is the smart system using IoT, Internet of Things, many devices and facilities already have the measurement devices but we wanted to connect all the systems together and control it using IoT technology.

We just started three projects, one is energy saving, and the other one is valve optimization, and the other is water meter monitoring. With that kind of technology we can control the system automatically, wise and smart. This is the last slide of the lecture. I selected the six key words. The waterworks system of Seoul has 107 years of history.

The city has broad spectrum of technology and experience.  Yes, we have challenges from climate change and new chemicals but the city has made every effort to keep the water system sustainable.

And knowledge and experience that the city accumulated can be shared by the cities all over the world. Thank you for listening, please feel free to contact me if you have questions or issues to discuss on waterworks system.

Thank you very much

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