Sankey Diagrams

In the Wiki of the CD4WC (Cost Effective Development of Urban Wastewater Systems for Water Directive Compliance) project, I found an interesting Sankey diagram that I wanted to share with you.

This project, funded by the European Commission, deals “with optimising the efficiency of urban wastewater systems with regard to ecological consequences in natural water bodies and with regard to investment and operation costs.”

The waste water treatment process system is shown with a schematic flow diagram. For individual substances that can be found in the waste water, the diagram is then displayed with Sankey flows, that represent the quantity. Thus, Sankey diagrams are a possibility for the “determination of fluxes of substances per unit of time”. This presentation is part of a method is coined Substance Flow Analysis.

This presentation is very advantageous: The nodes in the system (the process blocks) remain at the same position, only the magnitude of the arrows changes, when switching to the substance flows view. Flows with large quantities substances are clearly visible.

It would also be a possibility to introduce as a third view (next to absolute water quantity, and substance quantities) the substance concentrations (impurities per m³ of waste water).

I had bookmarked a number of Sankey diagrams a while ago when visiting the website of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. These diagrams on energy, CO2 and freshwater are a great source of information. You can, for example, find the typical energy Sankey diagrams (like the one in my previous post) for the U.S. all the way back to 1950, 1960 and 1970 and then from 1973 to today.

Summer is coming closer, and we can again expect water shortage in some states. So the Sankey diagram I have selected for presentation today (original PDF), is for freshwater withdrawals in the year 2000.

The overall extraction was 345.000 Mgal/day (roughly 1.3 bio litres per day) with approximately 75 % from surface water and 25 % from ground water. Another 62.300 Mgal/day of saline water is withdrawn for thermoelectric use.

The largest portion of the water is for irrigation, livestock and aquaculture, closely followed by the water used in thermoelectric power generation. Domestic self-supply is a comparatively marginal 3,590 Mgal/day (1,04 %), which makes my Mom’s call to “close the tap” sound somewhat ridiculous.