An Infrastructure Miracle! Wastewater Treatment Plant Completely Specified in Two Hours

Transcend combines expert industry knowledge with AI to completely specify wastewater and water treatment plants and electrical substations.

Transcend lets you mark the boundaries of your water treatment plan anywhere on Earth with an easy-to-use interface in your browser. Image: Transcend.

Transcend lets you mark the boundaries of your water treatment plan anywhere on Earth with an easy-to-use interface in your browser. Image: Transcend.

Transcend has an application that optimizes the design of wastewater plants. The cloud-based Transcend Design Generator (TDG) will accept inputs and constraints, such as the space allocated for the plant, inlet and outlet capacities and, at the minimum, a handful of other parameters—and voila! generate a design, including detailed plans. But that is not all. The application will generate all sorts of supporting documentation, such as equipment lists, engineering reports, load lists … the whole ball of wax; in other words, it is completed in the time it takes you to have lunch—albeit a long one.

Biological wastewater treatment is a modern application of an age-old problem: what to do with sewage. The days of dumping it on the streets and into streams are gone and we live in an age when chemicals are overused. Treating sewage with bacteria instead of chemicals is viewed as a more Earth-friendly solution.

Transcend CEO and founder, Ari Raivetz, claims to design and specify a biological wastewater treatment plan in 10 percent of the time it would take a team of designers using conventional building information modeling (BIM) tools. He is being modest. In a first look and with no prior experience, we were able to get most of a plant specified and modeled in less than an afternoon. It took less than 15 minutes to provide input. Granted, we were winging it, using default values wherever possible. A serious attempt to create a wastewater plant would have required some research and taken considerably longer to prepare the input values.

What to Do with the Time You Save?

Raivetz, he who has designed wastewater treatment plants in Europe and learned the hard way (not with a pushbutton application like the one he is now making available), suggests that you use the time to not only look at options that optimize performance—and, perhaps more importantly from a sustainability perspective—but also look at options that would improve the plant’s sustainability even further. You can vary the parameters, let TDG create another variation of the design and see if there is less use of energy and less of a carbon footprint, among other considerations.

A Test Run

You start by feeding TDG project information and initial settings, such as units preferred, and for the sake of local regulations, what country the plant is located. But TDG gets local real fast. You zoom into an Earth view to draw a rough outline of the boundaries of a plant on the ground, with local features, like roads, structures and waterways in view. You mark the entrance and the influent and effluent points. You can also add build zones, such as sludge areas, pretreatment areas, and so on.

The UI is insanely easy to use. This is not a CAD program. There is absolutely no learning curve. The application is browser based and runs in the cloud wherever Transcend is hosting it. There is nothing to download and install. There is nothing to buy—you can run the basic version for free. There are zero barriers to entry.

You supply the necessary data for flow, influent and effluent. Although typical values are suggested for almost all required fields, you can override the values as well as specify additional parameters. For instance, you can add peak flow rates, maximum temperatures and relative humidity.

It literally took minutes to enter all the information required with only the slightest hitch. The system displayed metric units, even though I had selected imperial units. After you’ve entered your information, you press “run” and the system goes to work, grinding out the calculations and the design.

Go have lunch (a long one). The process usually takes a few hours, it says.

Site plan-ground level—automatically generated. Image: Transcend.

Site plan-ground level—automatically generated. Image: Transcend.
Plant process scheme automatically generated. Image: Transcend.

Plant process scheme automatically generated. Image: Transcend.

We return to be greeted with an electronic stack of documents that almost completely detail a fully built biological wastewater treatment plant. There is a design basis (7 pages); a process scheme; a 10-page technical description; a sample piping
and instrumentation diagram (PID); and a 7-page equipment list that has every single centrifuge, pump, scraper, sludge container needed. All that is missing on the equipment list is a “buy it now” link.

A bill of quantities for civil engineers details all volumes of dirt for the cut or fill for the site in exact quantity as well as how much concrete needs to be poured. You will know how much electrical power is needed (load list). There is a 2-page OpEx document, which shows the various operations and the resources consumed—though not the actual expenses of them. A 4-page instrument list shows the sensors needed … and there’s more. The detail is almost excruciating: wall plaster, ceiling plaster is given in m2.

But even with the volume of specs generated for free, we quibble. The amount of furniture needed for the operators, their desks, chairs, and more, was glossed over. A site plan shows what looks like 3D buildings on a site.
You have to squint at the PDF to make out the physical plant but with a click of
a button, you can download an editable BIM file with all the detail you need.

The design documents are free in PDF format. To get the editable files, like
DWG or RVT, you have to pony up. Then comes an editable PID, mechanical
equipment (BOQ), OpEx with real costs, detailed floor plans, 3D model, and more.

Transcend may have taken Albert Einstein, who said “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler,” to heart. Honestly, making a wastewater plant from scratch could not be any simpler than Transcend has made it.

For more information, visit the Transcend site at https://transcendinfra.com/.

To be continued.