1. Case Study of Vegetative Treatment System Performance
- Author
-
Sun, Sihan
- Abstract
Vegetative treatment systems (VTS) are analyzed as a possible alternative to holding ponds to manage runoff from cattle feedlots. This study was conducted to validate a VTS model with the previously measured data from a Minnehaha County VTS Site, South Dakota. The performance of VTS was evaluated by determining water inflow, outflow, precipitation and mass inflow, outflow on vegetative treatment areas (VTA). The balances were determined by using all VTA inflow, outflow, nutrient concentrations of the inflow water, and the soil nutrient concentrations within the VTA. Seven years have been completed in simulating VTS data for the Minnehaha County site in South Dakota. There were two years of measured data for the Minnehaha County site to use in comparison to the simulated data. There were no simulated surface water releases from the VTA during the simulation period from 2007 to 2013. The VTS was fully successful in preventing surface water releases. The simulated nitrate concentration, total Kjeldahl nitrogen concentration, and total phosphorus concentration in the water for the Years 2009 and 2010 were compared with measured data. All demonstrated close similarity to the measured data, indicating that the model accurately simulated the performance of the VTS. All of these results indicate that VTS has potential to become a treatment system for the containment of both water and nutrients in feedlot runoff.
- Published
- 2015