Rediseño de una planta de tratamiento de agua potable en la parroquia San Pablo del Lago, cantón Otavalo, provincia de Imbabura

Abstract

The redesign of the drinking water treatment plant in the parish of San Pablo del Lago, Otavalo canton, Imbabura province, aims to implement new treatment structures. Water sampling was carried out systematically for 4 weeks, in each process of the current treatment plant, in order to perform physical-chemical and microbiological analyses to verify the current state of the plant, where it was identified that the water presented problems of turbidity and phosphates since the values obtained for these were outside the permissible limit of INEN 1108, for turbidity 5 NTU and for phosphates 0.1 mg/L. The characterization analyses were carried out at the Drinking Water Laboratory of the Municipality of Otavalo using analytical methods. The results of the research carried out under different climatic conditions allowed to establish that the redesign consisted of: a parshall flow meter with a width of the throat W = 0.229m, height of the crest above the throat Ha = 0.132 m, height of the water above the throat Hb = 0.079 m. Two settlers with a critical settling velocity 0.26 mm/s, runoff velocity = 3.017* m/s, entrainment velocity = 1.58 m/s, and with the following dimensions: height H = 2.34m, length L=13.6 m, settler width B= 3.4m. Two ascending prefilters with a filtration velocity of 0.6 m/h and three slow filters with a filtration velocity of 0.3 m/h. After conducting pilot tests in the laboratory, the following results were obtained: turbidity 0.41 NTU and phosphates 0.031 mg/L, parameters that are within the established standards. Thus, the efficiency of the treatment plant and the quality of the water supplied to the population of San Pablo del Lago were improved. It was concluded that the proposed treatment system is the most suitable for improving water quality.