Defining Risk-Based Monitoring Frequencies to Verify the Performance of Water Treatment Barriers

Émile Sylvestre; Eva Reynaert; Timothy R Julian

doi:10.1021/acs.estlett.3c00154

Defining Risk-Based Monitoring Frequencies to Verify the Performance of Water Treatment Barriers

Environ Sci Technol Lett. 2023 Mar 13;10(4):379-384. doi: 10.1021/acs.estlett.3c00154. eCollection 2023 Apr 11.

Authors

Émile Sylvestre¹, Eva Reynaert^{1

2}, Timothy R Julian^{1

3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Dübendorf CH-8600, Switzerland.
² ETH Zürich, Institute of Environmental Engineering, 8093 Zürich, Switzerland.
³ Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, 4051 Basel, Switzerland.
⁴ University of Basel, 4055 Basel, Switzerland.

Abstract

Preventing failures of water treatment barriers can play an important role in meeting the increasing demand for microbiologically safe water. The development and integration of failure prevention strategies into quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) offer opportunities to support the design and operation of treatment trains. This study presents existing failure models and extends them to guide the development of risk-based operational monitoring strategies. For barriers with rapid performance loss, results show that a failure of 15 s should be reliably detected to verify a log reduction value (LRV) of 6.0; thus, detecting and remediating these failures may be beyond current technology. For chemical disinfection with a residual, failure durations in order of minutes should be reliably detected to verify a LRV of 6.0. Short-term failures are buffered because the disinfectant residual concentration sustains a partial reduction performance. Therefore, increasing the contact time and hydraulic mixing reduces the impact of failures. These findings demonstrate the importance of defining precise frequencies to monitor barrier performances during operation. Overall, this study highlights the utility of process-specific models for developing failure prevention strategies for water safety management.