New Facilities Double District’s Capacity

As a result of  the continued growth in northern Colorado, South Fort Collins Sanitation District needed to increase their capacity at the headworks and in their dewatering facilities.  Farnsworth Group designed a new headworks with finer screens, better grit removal and twice the flow capacity. 

The newly designed and constructed dewatering building has a centrifuge, providing redundancy for the existing unit, and higher through-put, thus shorter run times which reduces operation costs. The new facilities provide increased efficiency, performance, and energy conservation.

Due to high ground water tables and highly expansive soils on the site, the Headworks facility structure was designed to be on drilled piers extending 30 feet below the bottom of the 40-foot deep Headworks structure. The new Headworks Building footprint is 120-feet long and 65-feet wide. The facility has a hydraulic capacity of 18 MGD. All influent pumps are in a wetwell/drywell configuration for easier maintenance.

In addition to the new Headworks Building, the District also needed to increase the capacity of the sludge dewatering and disposal system. The new Dewatering Building houses all the equipment related to sludge dewatering. Sludge feed pumps (two duty and one standby) are in the basement. The ground floor has the emulsion polymer batching/dosing system on one side and a drive through truck bay for haul trucks. The upper floor has all the electrical equipment and accommodates the dewatering centrifuge, with room for a future, second unit. The new centrifuge is capable of dewatering sludge feed at a 300 gpm rate with 1% solids concentration. 

Features include:

• Three influent barscreens, two trains of fine grit removal, flow measurement, and five influent pumps.
• Innovative ventilation control system which allows for safe entry while minimizing energy requirements for conditioning the airflow.
• Fine screens combined with vortex technology, high-efficiency grit removal and washing that both use vortex technology completes this facility.