GEI Consultants

Project Designer Co-op · May – Aug 2023 · Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

  • Project Designer Co-op, May – Aug 2023

Hydraulic Analysis · Data Analysis · Professional Report Writing · Cost Estimation · Site Inspection

As a project designer co-op in GEI's water resources group, I supported engineering work on water and wastewater infrastructure. I analyzed pump efficiency and friction losses at wastewater pumping stations to determine whether the pumps or the piping were limiting performance, and built a parametric cost-estimation model that gives clients a rough price for a new treatment plant from only its flow rate and process components.

I also took part in site inspections and turned the findings into formal client reports.

Pump Efficiency Calculation

Goal: This project involved creating detailed calculations and a report on the efficiency of the pumps and the pipes for wastewater pumping stations. The goal was to isolate the issues to either the pump or the pipes to allow the customer to choose what would be most optimal to fix first.

Method: Each calculation compared the expected flow rate (based on the pump specifications, length of the pipe, shape of the pipes, and height it needs to pump) against the actual measured flow rate calculated using the derivative of liquid height (compensating for changes in well shape).

Result: The final graph shows the operating point of the pumps. The pumps were operating at 93% of their expected capacity, whereas the rest of the system added much more resistance, which was the main limiting factor of the pumping station's performance.

Water Treatment Plant Cost Estimation

Goal: This project involved creating a parametric cost-estimation model to estimate water and wastewater treatment plants based on as few input variables as possible. This would allow the customers to instantly get a very rough estimate of what a new plant would cost without the need for detailed assessments. The model only took in the plant's total flow rate and the existence of individual process components.

Method: Two methods were combined to get a final estimate: a flowrate-based method, which fit a cost-to-flowrate curve based on historical data from comparable plants worldwide, and a building block method, which fit a cost-to-flowrate curve for each individual process and combined them to get a final result.

Output: The charts show the results of the model, showing the output results for both methods individually and the individual cost estimates per process.