Wastewater Treatment in Maturation Ponds Towards a More Livable City

Wastewater treatment is a process to improve the water quality making it suitable for discharge back to the environment. Since wastewater majorly comes from humans, wastewater treatment plants are required in urban areas to improve the quality of the environment and life in cities. In Ecuador, wastewater treatment is frequently solved by a waste stabilization pond system which offer completely natural purifying processes. Unfortunately, most of the ponds are not in optimal conditions and show deficiencies in hydrodynamics and sediment removal. The objective of this work was to demonstrate how a hydraulic improvement of a maturation pond can be achieved by applying Computational Fluid Dynamics. Ansys Fluent software was used to perform a two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulation of the maturation pond in the Playas canton. Several interventions in the pond design were proposed and studied from the hydraulic efficiency point of view. It was generally concluded that the use of the Computational Fluid Dynamics is beneficial to design, analyze and optimize complex waste stabilization pond systems, resulting in an increased quality of life in cities.