Modelling bacteriological water quality in drinking water distribution systems

Because on-site experimentation raises numerous problems, the study and the modelling of bacterial regrowth phenomena in drinking water distribution systems has been performed using a pipe loop pilot under various operating conditions. As a result, experiments have shown that inlet bacterial counts have little influence on the biofilm behavior which is mainly driven by the amount of available nutrients (BDOC). Biofilm detachment has a significant influence on the increase of suspended bacterial counts with time in relation to the net growth in the bulk water. All these results have been used to develop and validate a deterministic type of model, called PICCOBIO. Some guidelines to achieve water bacteriological stability have been proposed using model simulations.