Dynamic resilience of wastewater treatment processes: a proposed approach for ageing assets

The UK water companies are coming under extreme pressure from the financial regulator Ofwat due to the Price Review 2019. The review identified that water companies are struggling to secure the long term resilience of their wastewater assets and infrastructure [1]. Evidence of this has also been linked to the privatisation of water companies in 1986, which reduced funding for proactive maintenance [2]. When the lack of maintenance funding is combined with
novel, rapidly emerging stressors such as the COVID 19 pandemic and climate change process stresses are generated [3], [4]. These process stresses are the effect of stressors and evident in discrete processes and whole wastewater treatment systems [5]. Therefore, characterising stressors and process stresses independently would offer additional visibility over long term resilience and short-term performance of discrete wastewater processes.

This research proposes dynamic resilience as a methodology for separating and visualising stressors and process stresses. These visualisations are presented as a heat map, combining actual instrument data and existing mechanistic modelling methodologies to present dynamic resilience visually.