Donohue & Associates and the City of Fishers received a 2022 ACEC Indiana Engineering Excellence Merit Award for the Cheeney Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant expansion and optimization project. The project team was challenged to increase peak flow treatment capacity by 4 million gallons per day (25%) while meeting challenging budget and site constraints.  

This project creatively, cost-effectively, and sustainably addressed project complexities by repurposing and reconfiguring existing infrastructure to expand capacity and optimizing current processes to provide reliable, effective, and efficient pollutant removal. Improvements included:

• Efficient Low Power Mixing - This plant is one of the first municipal treatment plants in Indiana to use inverse hyperbolic mixers to achieve biological phosphorus removal. The highly efficient mixers use 20% of the energy required by conventional mixing technology.
• Better Water Quality - Prior to this project, the Sludge Volume Index (SVI) was extremely erratic. Donohue’s design included A/O selectors to stabilize SVIs, improve effluent quality, and enhance treatment system capacity.
• Repurpose and Enhance Existing Infrastructure - Due to tight site restrictions, capacity was added by repurposing existing infrastructure, making what the community already owned more effective, and, in turn, maximizing their return on previous investments. This strategy also enhanced energy efficiency by improving performance within their existing infrastructure. Incorporating chemical enhanced primary treatment reduced organic loadings to the aeration system and avoided the construction and additional energy consumption of two large aeration basins. Novel approaches to reconfiguring and operating the four existing secondary clarifiers avoided the need to construct an additional secondary clarifier.

Because of this project, cleaner water is discharged to the White River, 25% more wastewater is treated at a lower cost per gallon, and the refined treatment process is poised to meet the needs of future growth.

See project video here:  https://youtu.be/GDZNM-WqsFI