The American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) of Massachusetts has awarded Tighe & Bond its prestigious Gold Award for the firm’s work at the Town of Sturbridge, Mass., wastewater treatment plant using an innovative combination of Siemens Water Technologies BioMag and CoMag systems.
“We are honored to receive this professional recognition and to have exceeded performance and compliance requirements for the town while delivering the project substantially below the estimated cost of a conventional treatment system,” said Ian Catlow, Tighe & Bond senior project manager. “The outcome is a result of a great collaboration between Tighe & Bond, the Town of Sturbridge and Siemens.”
Sturbridge originally planned to install a membrane bioreactor (MBR) to meet the need for additional wastewater treatment capacity in a highly constricted footprint, in addition to tighter permit limits for biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), total suspended solids (TSS), total nitrogen and phosphorus. However, after evaluating the high capital and operating costs of the MBR, the town and Tighe & Bond agreed to pilot test the Siemens BioMag System. By using magnetite to ballast biological floc, allowing an increase in mixed liquor concentration as high as 12,000 mg/L, the BioMag system proved to be a cost-effective alternative to MBR technology while expanding capacity from 2.84 mLd (0.75 mgd) to 6.06 mLd (1.62 mgd).
Next, to comply with anticipated lower phosphorus discharge limits and a desire for a reliable tertiary treatment process to follow the BioMag system, the town and Tighe & Bond initially planned to expand Sturbridge’s conventional media filtration system. Once again, after a demonstration proved that the installed cost of the larger sand filter would be greater than the smaller and higher-performing CoMag system, the town chose the Siemens solution. Since implementing the CoMag System, the plant has experienced no loss of productivity due to clogging, plugging or backwashing, and the town received a process guarantee providing <0.05 mg/L of effluent phosphorus.
For more information about Tighe & Bond’s work for the Town of Sturbridge, read the complete case study.
Source: Siemens Water Technologies
