CASE STUDY: Glenbard WWTP

In late 2004, Headworks Inc. was enlisted by the Glenbard Wastewater Treatment Plant in Illinois to bring the headworks portion of their facility up to date. This renovation was long over due considering that the old catenary type screens they had in place in 2004 had not been fully functioning since 1999.  

The flow fluctuates from as little as 3MGD to over 40MGD because the plant handles water from both the sewer system and the storm water system.

Often, the flow was in the 3MGD range with a flow velocity of 0.5 ft/s. This low flow created a vast amount of sediment in the channel. The catenary screen was climbing above the sediment and simply left it to build up in the channel requiring manual removal.

Strand Consultants, based in Madison, Wisconsin, were in charge of the new design. Working in tandem, the client and the consulting firm upon evaluating a variety of different options, decided to purchase Headworks’ Mahr® Bar Screens. For this challenging application, our equipment was the obvious choice.

The Mahr Bar screen is able to cope with the highly variable flow rates effortlessly. The most intriguing aspect of our equipment in the opinion of this client, as with many others, is the fact that Headworks has the experience and technology to provide a heavy duty bar screen with very fine bar spacing.  Glenbard decided upon spacing of 3/16” (4mm), taking advantage of the Mahr Bar Screen’s compact unit with both coarse and fine abilities.

Without the need for a coarse screen further upstream to protect the fine screening equipment, Glenbard was able to greatly reduce its equipment costs. A further realization by the City resulted when the prior significant manual labor costs incurred from raking the sediment in the channel on a regular basis were completely eliminated.

Mahr Bar Screen installed at Glenbard

In addition to the advantages mentioned above of the Mahr Bar Screen, our unit is able to be installed in extremely deep channels with very low overhead. The channel at the Glenbard plant is almost 30ft deep and other deeper channels are not an issue for this, the meanest toughest screen on the market.