Flush toilet

Summary

A flush toilet (also known as a flushing toilet, water closet (WC); see also toilet names) is a toilet that disposes of human waste (principally urine and feces) by using the force of water to flush it through a drainpipe to another location for treatment, either nearby or at a communal facility, thus maintaining a separation between humans and their waste. Flush toilets can be designed for sitting or squatting, in the case of squat toilets. Most modern sewage treatment systems are also designed to process specially designed toilet paper. The opposite of a flush toilet is a dry toilet, which uses no water for flushing. Flush toilets are a type of plumbing fixture and usually incorporate an "S", "U", "J", or "P" shaped bend called a trap that causes water to collect in the toilet bowl to hold the waste and act as a seal against noxious sewer gases. Most flush toilets are connected to a sewerage system that conveys wastewater to a sewage treatment plant; alternatively, a septic tank o

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet

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Rain water harvesting in urban New Zealand

Franklin Golay

Rainwater harvesting is a practice already widely used throughout rural New-Zealand, which makes it well developed on the country’s market as well as in people’s minds. Therefore, it is pertinent to study whether this sustainable practice could be implemented in urban areas so as to provide water for purposes such as toilet flushing, washing machines and garden use. This study concentrates on the health issues posed by roof water collecting with qualitative results for water quality, and on other aspects such as costs and benefits of such systems, politics towards this practice, and the impact it can have in recovering from a natural disaster. The results showed both environmental and faecal contamination of the harvested rainwater especially after important rainfall events, and the presence of such contamination in stored water can lead to disease outbreaks especially if consumed. However, testing effectuated on first flush diverted volumes revealed that such devices can considerably improve the harvested water’s quality if a quantity of water between fifty and eighty litres is diverted at the beginning of heavy rainfall. Cost wise, the slimline tanks series is well adapted to urban environments due to their shape but the price to pay is twice that of a normal tank. A 5’000 litres normal tank seems the best option as its mean price is of 1’500 NZD and its efficiency in providing the household with water for different uses is usually around 80% and can reach up to 95%. Furthermore, if in the future the authorities realize the advantages of having rainwater tanks installed in urban areas, rebates could then be offered on the acquirement of such systems.

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Winter cascading of cold water in Lake Geneva

Ulrich Lemmin

[1] During the winters of 1998 and 1999, observations were made of the cascading of cold water from the nearshore, shallow "shelf'' zones and down the sloping sides of Lake Geneva. Cascading starts on the average 10 hours after the onset of surface cooling. The draining cold water descends like a gravity current, and the downslope speed of the head of these slugs of cold water, U, has a mean value of 5.2 cm s(-1), with slugs persisting, on the average, for 8 hours. When the Monin-Obukov length scale at the water surface, L, is negative, implying convection occurs, and (d) over bar/\L> 1, where d is the mean shelf depth, the nondimensionalized speed of the front of "slugs,'' U/b(1/3) is found to be 1.3 +/- 0.4, where b is the surface buoyancy flux integrated over the time period from one slug to the next. Each slug is unsteady, the head being followed by several fronts in which the temperature of the current decreases and its thickness increases. These fronts travel faster than the mean flow by a factor of r = 1.38 +/- 0.3. Dynamical similarities are found with roll waves observed in turbulent open channel flows. The circulation induced by the cascade is found to give a positive skewness to the time derivatives of near-surface temperature in shallow waters, in contrast with negative values close to the slope. The volume of cold water carried by a slug increases with downslope distance as a consequence of turbulent entrainment and the contribution of convectively unstable plumes from the surface. The average volume carried by the slug across the 21 m depth contour is about 1.9 times the volume of water in shallower water (i.e., that on the shelf between shore and a depth of 21 m), implying that cascading is an efficient means of flushing shelf water. Integrated around the lake the mean total volume flux amounts to 11.5 the average winter river inflow.

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