S-Risk 1.1.0

Released on April 14th, 2015.

List of changes in this release

S-Risk 1.1.0 is a major release introducing two new features: the summary report and simulating over concentration ranges. We also extended the S-Risk calculation capacity and adjusted a number of minor issues.

These are newly introduced features and, while tested as thoroughly as possible, they may still show problems in some situations. If you notice any problems, or if you suspect any errors or malfunctioning, please let us know via the S-Risk Helpdesk at s-risk@spaque.be.

Summary report

S-Risk now provides a "summary report", an overview of the main S-Risk results on the Results tab. This report shows the latest calculation results in a more efficient and attractive way, while still aiming to be as complete as possible.

The summary report will also be generated for your existing simulations. The existing, extended S-Risk PDF reports are still available, and complement this summary report with a lot more detailed configuration details and intermediate results. Whenever the summary report does not provide the level of detail needed, the extended report can be used.

The summary report contains the following sections:

  • "Main results"
    This table shows, per chemical, the most critical risk results and concentration indices (application II) or the most stringent soil concentrations (applications I and III) for the different risk endpoints. Values exceeding the risk thresholds are shown in red for quick inspection.
  • "Conceptual site model"
    This section summarizes the model configuration you have made, showing the main determining parameters and concentrations in your simulation.
  • "Results per chemical"
    This section shows the detailed results per chemical substance in your simulation and resembles the "Summary" section in the extended PDF report. This concerns the risk (or critical soil concentration) results, concentration indexes, the detailed exposure results per pathway and local versus background exposure.
  • "Listing of user-modified parameters"
    This last section gives an overview of all parameters that were changed from the default value by the user in this simulation. Comments, if provided by the user, are shown.

Clicking the "Print" button enables you to get a clean printout of the summary report. Via "print to PDF" functionality, you can save the report to hard disk (the Chrome browser allows saving to PDF directly, for other browsers there are solutions like PDFCreator, Adobe Acrobat, ...).

Simulating ranges of soil/groundwater concentrations

The second new feature can be found in the new "Graph" tab, next to the "Results" tab.

Here, you can simulate a range of concentrations for a selected chemical, soil layer/groundwater layer and result parameter. S-Risk will vary the concentration of this chemical in the specified soil layer between the specified lower and upper limits, and calculate the corresponding values for the result parameter (risk or concentration index).
When the calculations have been executed, a graph will be constructed showing the value of the result parameter over the specified concentration range.

This functionality serves various purposes:

  • it allows you to quickly get an overview of how the risk evolves in function of the concentration, without manually changing concentrations all the time
  • it allows you to get a quick estimate of the remediation goal, by visualizing the point where, for example, the risk index exceeds the RI = 1 level
  • it allows you to get more context for the results in Application I and III. Especially when application I or III results in strange remediation goals (e.g., negative values or warning messages in the extended report), this feature can show you why.

Extended calculation capacity

Until now, S-Risk relied on two calculation servers to perform the requested S-Risk simulations. Calculation scheduling was based on a FIFO (first-in, first-out) principle. On occasion, this resulted in simulations being "queued" for some time before calculations could start.

We have now added a third calculation server and a per-user "simultaneous simulation" limits to reduce the chance of temporary calculation bottlenecks.

Additional adjustments

  • resolved issues with periods versus commas in entered values in the Dutch interface
  • adjusted saving of measured egg concentrations
  • resolved issues with K_p value display in Exposure tab
  • land use parameter comments now shown in the extended report