Abstract

The City of Hamilton is still largely served by combined sewers. During dry weather, and small storm events, combined sewage is conveyed to the Region’s Woodward Avenue STP. During larger rainfall events, specifically high intensity thunderstorms, the combined discharge of stormwater runoff and sanitary wastewater may exceed the capacity of the sanitary interceptors and STP. Automatic regulators installed at various points in the system limit flow to the interceptors resulting in CS0s. The advent of inexpensive, computationally powerful microcomputers has introduced the possibility of economically controlling these regulators in real-time to minimize CS0s. While a small number of applications of this technology exist elsewhere, this approach has not been sufficiently tested in Ontario.

In 1989 the Regional Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth initiated a demonstration project to design, install and evaluate a microcomputer-based real-time control system for managing CS0s. This paper reviews the following components of the Royal Avenue RTC Demonstration Project:

1. the design and installation of a real-time rainfall and flow monitoring network and telemetry system;

2. the design and installation of a microcomputer controller for operating the automatic sluice gate in the Royal Avenue CSO Regulator;

3. the estimation of CSO frequencies and volumes at Royal Avenue (with and without RTC) via continuous modelling, using the SWMM RUNOFF and TRANSPORT modules; and

4. the development of software for real-time data acquisition, database management and processing, and RTC of the Royal Avenue CSO regulator.

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