A CFD Modeling Approach for Municipal Sewer System Design Optimization to Minimize Emissions into Receiving Water Body

The design of the urban sewage system is site specific, and it makes the use of three-dimensional (3D) model an alternative to a field study or a laboratory experiment. However, the use of 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in the study of the urban sewage system has been generally limited to the study of a single structural component with simplified assumptions. In this study, the 3D model that adopted the renormalized group (RNG) k-ε turbulence model, the volume of fluid (VOF) free water surface model and the particle tracking approach was verified comparing the predicted flow field data with the measurements in laboratory scale experiments. Then, the model was applied to optimize the design of the combined sewer system (CSS) in the city of Edmonton with multiple hydraulic structures. Considering the details of predicted flow characteristics and the behaviors of the suspended solids, the final design was chosen and implemented to reduce the water pollution induced by the direct combined sewer overflow (CSO) discharge to the receiving water body. It is shown that the proposed 3D CFD modeling approach is a cost-effective tool to design the municipal sewer system.