Jeroen Langeveld

Delft University of Technology | TU · Department of Water management

Background Wastewater surveillance may support early and comprehensive detection of infectious diseases’ community transmission, particularly in settings where other health surveillance systems provide biased or limited information. Amid the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, deploying passive samplers to monitor targeted populations gained importance. Evaluatio...

Background Enteric hepatitis A virus (HAV) infections during childhood are often asymptomatic but may cause severe illness in adults. To improve public health surveillance we assessed the applicability of sewage monitoring during an HAV outbreak at a primary school. Methods Between October 19 and December 27, 2022, five symptomatic HAV cases were...

Asset management issues are and will always be key concerns for many stakeholders in the water sector. Despite this, there is still a lack of awareness and clear guidance on the topic. There has been some focus on the management of drainage pipes, but more effort needs to be dedicated to examining the various regulations, practices, and research wi...

Asset management issues are and will always be key concerns for many stakeholders in the water sector. Despite this, there is still a lack of awareness and clear guidance on the topic. There has been some focus on the management of drainage pipes, but more effort needs to be dedicated to examining the various regulations, practices, and research wi...

Co-located infrastructure networks such as roads, water, and sewer in theory offer the possibility for integrated multi-infrastructure interventions. However, how closely these networks are aligned in space and time determines the practical extent to which such coordinated interventions can be realized. This study quantifies the spatial alignment o...

Enhancing sediment accumulation monitoring techniques in sewers will enable a better understanding of the build-up processes to develop improved cleaning strategies. Thermal sensors provide a solution to sediment depth estimation by passively monitoring temperature fluctuations in the wastewater and sediment beds, which allows evaluation of the hea...

Background Enteric hepatitis A virus (HAV) infections during childhood are often asymptomatic but may cause severe illness in adults. To improve public health surveillance we assessed the applicability of sewage monitoring during an HAV outbreak at a primary school. Methods Between October 19 and December 27, 2022, five symptomatic HAV cases were n...

Sediments in urban drainage systems (UDS) significantly impact their operation, so effective strategies are required to reduce their negative effects. Monitoring sediment accumulation provides valuable insights into sediment characteristics, sediment...

Illicit connections of wastewater to stormwater systems are the main drawback of separate sewer systems, as they lead to a direct discharge of untreated wastewater to the aquatic environment. Consequently, several inspection methods have been developed for detecting illicit connections. This study simultaneously applied several low- and high-tech m...

Model Predictive Control (MPC) of Urban Drainage Systems (UDS) has been established as a cost‐effective method to reduce pollution. However, the operation of large UDS (containing over 20 actuators) can only be optimized by oversimplifying the UDS dynamics, potentially leading to a decrease in performance and reduction in users' trust, thus inhibit...

Urban areas are constantly developing and thereby affect the local water cycle. Real‐time control (RTC) strategies are used to operate urban drainage systems optimally during these transitions. This paper aims to develop a methodology to study the impacts of common gradual changes occurring in the urban environment (densification of the urban area...

Despite high vaccination rates in the Netherlands, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) continues to circulate. Longitudinal sewage surveillance was implemented along with the notification of cases as two parts of the surveillance pyramid to validate the use of sewage for surveillance, as an early warning tool, and to measur...

The ecological state of receiving water bodies can be significantly influenced by organic micropollutants that are emitted via stormwater runoff. Reported efforts to quantify the emission of micropollutants mainly focus on sampling at combined sewer overflows and storm sewer outfalls, which can be challenging. An alternative method, called fingerpr...

Urban drainage systems are composed of subsystems. The ratio of the storage and discharge capacities of the subsystems determines the performance. The performance of the urban water system may deteriorate as a result of the change in the ratio of storage to discharge capacity due to aging, urbanisation and climate change. We developed the graph-bas...

Urban Drainage Systems can cause ecological and public health issues by releasing untreated contaminated water into the environment. Real-time control (RTC), augmented with rainfall nowcast, can effectively reduce these pollution loads. This research aims to identify key dynamics in the nowcast accuracies and relate those to the performance of nowc...

Monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater (WW) is a promising tool for epidemiological surveillance, correlating not only viral RNA levels with the infection dynamics within the population, but also to viral diversity. However, the complex mixture of viral lineages in WW samples makes tracking of specific variants or lineages circulating in the popula...

Urban water is a crucial element of cities for the purpose of events and recreation, raising concern over the water quality and relatedly hygienic safety. In this study, a near...

Model Predictive Control (MPC) of combined sewer systems can reduce environmental degradation caused by uncontrolled overflows. However, practical uncertainties are often neglected when assessing the potential of MPC strategies. This paper aims to understand the risks associated with using a non-perfect internal MPC-model, real precipitation foreca...

Over the course of the Corona Virus Disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020–2022, monitoring of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 ribonucleic acid (SARS-CoV-2 RNA) in wastewater has rapidly evolved into a supplementary surveillance instrument for public health. Short term trends (2 weeks) are used as a basis for policy and decision...

Urban drainage systems have developed way beyond the traditional piped combined or separate sewer systems. Many ‘new’ systems are being introduced, ranging from stormwater infiltration facilities to green roofs. However, the widely advocated blue-green infrastructures are typically overlooked by asset managers, which will very likely have detriment...

An outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant (Pango lineage B.1.1.7) was detected at a primary school (School X) in Lansingerland, the Netherlands, in December 2020. The outbreak was studied retrospectively, and population-based screening was used to assess the extent of virus circulation and decelerate transmission. Cases were SARS-CoV-2 laboratory con...

This article explores the potential of vibro-acoustics to detect physical ageing of plastic pipes. For this purpose, two different topics are combined: the ability of vibro-acoustics to estimate the storage modulus of a plastic pipe, and the sensitivity of the estimated storage modulus to changes due to ageing. Concerning the first topic, a vibro-a...

The prosperity of urban life is dependent on its infrastructure. Urban underground infrastructure components (assets) are aging and need regular monitoring, maintenance and rehabilitation. These assets are often placed under pavements and in close vicinity to each other. Managing them in a coordinated way is rational considering costs and disruptio...

Illicit connections to storm sewers have a negative impact on surface water quality in Berlin. To improve water quality in the city, the Berliner Wasserbetriebe intends to locate and eliminate these illicit connections. The current approach using visual and CCTV inspection to pinpoint the exact locations of illicit discharges has proven insufficien...

Urban water systems are under increased pressure from ongoing developments like climate change, population growth and urbanization. While it is clear that current urban water challenges need a more integrated approach, practitioners disagree on what such an integrated approach means exactly. Integration could therefore be described as a wicked prob...

Background Despite high vaccination rates in the Netherlands, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) continues to circulate. Longitudinal sewage monitoring was implemented along with the notification of cases as two parts of the surveillance pyramid to validate the use of sewage surveillance for monitoring SARS-CoV-2, as an ea...

Surrogate models replace computationally expensive simulations of physically‐based models to obtain accurate results at a fraction of the time. These surrogate models, also known as metamodels, have been employed for analysis, control, and optimization of water distribution and urban drainage systems. With the advent of machine learning (ML), water...

Infiltration and inflow (I/I) into sanitary sewers causes numerous negative effects on the whole wastewater management system and ultimately, on the receiving waters. Consequently, a number of methods have been developed to analyse the performance of sewer systems with respect to I/I, including: distributed temperature sensing (DTS), closed-circuit...

The main application of the mobile geo-electrical measurement is the detection of the presence and determining the location of leakage in sewer systems. To do so, this method relies on the increase in the measured electrical current between an electrode inside and an electrode outside the sewer system. To use this technique for the quantification o...

Real Time Control (RTC) is widely accepted as a cost-effective way to operate urban drainage systems (UDS) effectively. However, what factors influence RTC efficacy and how this might change in the long term remains largely unknown. This paper reviews the literature to understand what these factors likely are, and how they can be assessed in the fu...

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021, monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater has rapidly evolved into a supplementary surveillance instrument for public health. Short term trends (2 weeks) are used as a basis for policy and decision making on measures for dealing with the pandemic. Normalization is required to account for the v...

Urban runoff remobilises solids and their associated pollutants from urban-built environments and transports them to drainage systems via gully pots. This study presents an extensive monitoring campaign on the solids loading to drainage systems, including 104 gully pots as sampling locations and lasting 2 years. The solids loading is modelled with...

The shedding of pathogens by infected humans enables the use of sewage monitoring to conduct wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE). Although most WBE studies use data from large sewage treatment plants, timely data from smaller catchments are needed for targeted public health action. Traditional sampling methods, like autosamplers or grab sampling, a...

To evaluate the performance of Real Time Control (RTC) of urban drainage systems (UDS) a comparison is made with the pre-RTC situation, making the RTC performance dependent on the functioning of the UDS prior to implementation. To standardise things, a generalised baseline is formulated here as the operation with optimal static settings of the UDS....

Urban sewer networks (SNs) are increasingly facing water quality issues as a result of many challenges, such as population growth, urbanization and climate change. A promising way to addressing these issues is by developing and using water quality models. Many of these models have been developed in recent years to facilitate the management of SNs....

Despite being widely implemented, sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) do not always function flawlessly. While SUDS have been tested extensively and seem to perform well on a laboratory or pilot scale, practitioners' experience is different: failures in SUDS occur regularly in practice, resulting in malfunctioning systems, water nuisance and...

Runoff (re)mobilises solids and their associated pollutants from streets and transports them via gully pots to the drainage system. As the solids negatively impact the performance of the drainage systems, knowledge on the solids loading in terms of mass and composition is essential. However, monitoring data on the solids loading, in particular, cov...

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) sewer pipes have operated for decades in a hostile environment, raising concern among sewer managers over the longevity of their drainage systems. Inspection data (CCTV and Panoramo®) reveals that severe defects have already surfaced, yet it is unknown if the material properties of PVC sewers have been affected. In order to...

The shedding of pathogens by infected humans enables the use of sewage monitoring to conduct wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE). Although most WBE studies use data from large sewage treatment plants, timely data from smaller catchments is needed for any targeted public health action. Traditional sampling methods, like autosamplers or grab sampling...

Climate change and urbanization, as well as growing environmental and economic concerns, highlight the limitations of traditional wastewater practices and thereby challenge the management of urban water systems. Both in theory and in practice, it has been widely acknowledged that the challenges of the twenty-first century require solutions that add...

Urban runoff (re)mobilises solids present on the street surface and transport them to urban drainage systems. The solids reduce the hydraulic capacity of the drainage system due to sedimentation and on the quality of receiving water bodies due to discharges via outfalls and combined sewer overflows (CSOs) of solids and associated pollutants. To red...

Runoff entering urban drainage systems contains suspended solids, which carry pollutants and may cause blockages in downstream parts of the system (for example infiltration facilities). Suspended solids inflow should, therefore, preferably be controlled by solids removal at gully pots. This paper presents the results of lab experiments on the solid...

Gully pots are utilized for conveying runoff to drainage systems, as well as for reducing the system's solids loading by retaining suspended solids. However, the accumulation of solids in gully pots reduces their removal efficiency, leading to an increase in solids transport towards the drainage system. This article aims to identify the main driver...

Water quality environmental assessment often requires the joint simulation of several subsystems (e.g. wastewater treatment processes, urban drainage and receiving water bodies). The complexity of these integrated catchment models grows fast, leading to potentially over-parameterised and computationally expensive models. The receiving water body ph...

Drinking water distribution networks (WDNs) are a crucial infrastructure for life in cities. Deterioration of this ageing, and partly hidden from view, infrastructure can result in losses due to leakage and an increased contamination risk. To counteract this, maintenance strategies are required to maintain the service level. Information on the most...

De kwaliteit van afstromend hemelwater wordt bepaald door de samenstelling van de neerslag en van de verontreinigingen die het hemelwater tijdens de afstroming over daken en wegen meeneemt. Ten behoeve van beleidsvorming stelt STOWA samen met stichting RIONED al sinds 2007 een Database Hemelwaterkwaliteit ter beschikking. In 2020 verschijnt een fli...

Sewer asset management gained momentum and importance in recent years due to economic considerations , since infrastructure maintenance and rehabilitation directly represent major investments. Because physical urban water infrastructure has life expectancies of up to 100 years or more, contemporary urban drainage systems are strongly influenced by...

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) has become one of the dominant construction materials for sewer systems over the past decades, as a result of its reputed merits. However, since PVC sewer pipes have operated for decades in a hostile environment, concern over their longevity has been lately raised by sewer managers in the Netherlands. Towards that direction...

Due to the ageing of our underground wastewater infrastructure, leakage of sewers and pressure mains and subsequent infiltration or exfiltration are becoming an increasingly important issue. Herein, we present a novel method to detect and potentially quantify exfiltration from sewer systems under variable flow conditions; the DEST method. The DEST...

Infiltration and inflow (I/I) into sewers cause negative effects on the sewer system, wastewater treatment plant and environment. Identifying the causes and locating the inflows is necessary in order to address the I/I problem. This paper focuses on using distributed temperature sensing (DTS) for identifying, locating and characterising I/I into a...

The description of intertwined ecological processes in surface waters requires a holistic approach that accounts for spatially distributed hydrological/water quality processes. This study describes a new approach to model dissolved oxygen (DO) based on linked hydrodynamic and closed nutrient cycle ecological models. Long term datasets from the Rive...

Receiving water quality simulation in highly urbanised areas requires the integration of several processes occurring at different space-time scales. These integrated catchment models deliver results with a significant uncertainty level associated. Still, uncertainty analysis is seldom applied in practice and the relative contribution of the individ...

Environmental models often contain parameters, which are not measurable, yet conceptual descriptions of some physical process. The value of such parameters is often derived by measuring internal state model variables in the system and indirectly tuning/calibrating the value of the parameters so some degree of match is achieved. Bayesian inference i...

This paper aims to stimulate discussion based on the experiences derived from the QUICS project (Quantifying Uncertainty in Integrated Catchment Studies). First it briefly discusses the current state of knowledge on uncertainties in sub-models of integrated catchment models and the existing frameworks for analysing uncertainty. Furthermore, it comp...

In urban hydrological models, rainfall is the main input and one of the main sources of uncertainty. To reach sufficient spatial coverage and resolution, the integration of several rainfall data sources, including rain gauges and weather radars, is often necessary. The uncertainty associated with rain gauge measurements is dependent on rainfall int...

In this work, an emulator for hydrodynamic simulators is presented, which is capable to take into account rainfall and parametric variations. The emulation scheme can compensate for the non-linear behaviour common in flow propagation solutions.

This work presents a method to emulate the flow dynamics of physically based hydrodynamic simulators under variations of time-dependent rainfall and parametric scenarios. Although surrogate modelling is often employed to deal with the computational burden of this type of simulators, common techniques used for model emulation as polynomial expansion...

Fat, oil and grease (FOG) deposits are an important contributor to blockages in building drainage systems. Such blockages bring undesirable financial, health and environmental costs, and thereby burden society. It is unclear to what extent the behavior of inhabitants, and more precisely domestic FOG disposal, affects the occurrence of FOG blockages...