Influences of Limited Ammonium Nitrogen and Water Temperature on the Urban Stream Restoration Using Bacterial Technology – View from the Perspective of Numerical Modelling

To complete the previously information issued on the feasibility study and some technical challenges identi-fied from the application of bacterial technology, this study presents another characteristics of numerical output as the bacterial growth is now also limited to ammonium nitrogen and water temperature. Based on the results obtained, it is found that the degradation of readily biodegradable COD will be much slower be-cause of lower bacterial growth. At certain period, the COD concentration will increase and be plotted higher later on compared to the model which is limited only to substrate and oxygen. Besides the ammonium nitro-gen, other parameters i.e. particulate products from COD decay and particulate degradable organic nitrogen will also increase soon after certain time. Considering the increase of ammonium nitrogen as it is also con-verted to nitrate nitrogen, it can be predicted that some algae may show up during the treatment processes. When the model is simulated under different water temperature, slower biodegradation process is presented at lower water temperature. Because the bacteria grow better at higher water temperature, more oxygen is then required. Finally, from this study, it is also identified that the artificial mixing and addition of oxygen at initial stage of treatment will considerably influence the restoration.

Extended activated sludge model no. 1 (ASM1) for simulating biodegradation process using bacterial technology

Phosphorus is one of the most important nutrients required to support various kinds of biodegradation processes. As this particular nutrient is not included in the activated sludge model no. 1 （ASM1）, this study extended this model in order to determine the fate of phosphorus during the biodegradation processes. When some of the kinetics parameters are modified using observed data from the restoration project of the Xuxi River in Wuxi City, China, from August 25 to 31 in 2009, the extended model shows excellent results. In order to obtain optimum values of coefficients of nitrogen and phosphorus, the mass fraction method was used to ensure that the final results were reasonable and practically relevant. The temporal distribution of the data calculated with the extended ASM1 approximates that of the observed data.

Effects of temporal variability on HBV model calibration

This study aimed to investigate the effects of temporal variability on the optimization of the Hydrologiska ByrS.ns Vattenbalansavedlning （HBV） model, as well as the calibration performance using manual optimization and average parameter values. By applying the HBV model to the Jiangwan Catchment, whose geological features include lots of cracks and gaps, simulations under various schemes were developed： short, medium-length, and long temporal calibrations. The results show that, with long temporal calibration, the objective function values of the Nash- Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient （NSE）, relative error （RE）, root mean square error （RMSE）, and high flow ratio generally deliver a preferable simulation. Although NSE and RMSE are relatively stable with different temporal scales, significant improvements to RE and the high flow ratio are seen with longer temporal calibration. It is also noted that use of average parameter values does not lead to better simulation results compared with manual optimization. With medium-length temporal calibration, manual optimization delivers the best simulation results, with NSE, RE, RMSE, and the high flow ratio being 0.563 6, 0.122 3, 0.978 8, and 0.854 7, respectively; and calibration using average parameter values delivers NSE, RE, RMSE, and the high flow ratio of 0.481 1, 0.467 6, 1.021 0, and 2.784 0, respectively. Similar behavior is found with long temporal calibration, when NSE, RE, RMSE, and the high flow ratio using manual optimization are 0.525 3, -0.069 2, 1.058 0, and 0.980 0, respectively, as compared with 0.490 3, 0.224 8, 1.096 2, and 0.547 9, respectively, using average parameter values. This study shows that selection of longer periods of temooral calibration in hvdrolouical analysis delivers better simulation in general for water balance analysis.