Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Improving The Simulation Of Large Lakes In Regional Climate Modeling: Two-Way Lake-Atmosphere Coupling With A 3d Hydrodynamic Model Of The Great Lakes, Pengfei Xue, Jeremy S. Pal, Xinyu Ye, John D. Lenters, Chenfu Huang, Philip Y. Chu

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Works

Accurate representations of lake–ice–atmosphere interactions in regional climate modeling remain one of the most critical and unresolved issues for understanding large-lake ecosystems and their watersheds. To date, the representation of the Great Lakes two-way interactions in regional climate models is achieved with one-dimensional (1D) lake models applied at the atmospheric model lake grid points distributed spatially across a 2D domain. While some progress has been made in refining 1D lake model processes, such models are fundamentally incapable of realistically resolving a number of physical processes in the Great Lakes. In this study, a two-way coupled 3D lake-ice–climate modeling system [Great …

Nebraska Public Water Supply Program Summary Report 2017

Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality: Reports

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established the Public Water System Supervision (PWSS) Program under the authority of the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Under the SDWA and the 1986 Amendments, EPA sets national limits on contaminant levels in drinking water to ensure that the water is safe for human consumption. These limits are known as Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs) and Maximum Residual Disinfectant Levels (MRDLs). For some regulations, EPA establishes treatment techniques in lieu of an MCL to control unacceptable levels of contaminants in water.

2017 Nebraska Groundwater Quality Monitoring Report

Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality: Reports

The 2001 Nebraska Legislature passed LB329 (Neb. Rev. Stat. §46-1304) which, in part, directed the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality (NDEQ) to report on groundwater quality monitoring in Nebraska. Reports have been issued annually since December 2001. The text of the statute applicable to this report follows: “The Department of Environmental Quality shall prepare a report outlining the extent of ground water quality monitoring conducted by natural resources districts during the preceding calendar year. The department shall analyze the data collected for the purpose of determining whether or not ground water quality is degrading or improving and shall present the …

Effect Of Operating Conditions And Ion Contaminations On Electro Coagulation And Oxidation Processes For Water Quality Improvement, Vouchlay Theng

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of ion contaminations and operating conditions on Electro Coagulation (EC) and Oxidation (EO) in turbidity and natural organic matter (NOM) removal. The experiments were conducted in 4 liters column. Ferrous and calcium were chosen as contaminated ions. The operating condition was varied in terms of initial pH and current density. 100 NTU turbidity and 70 mg/L NOM were synthesized from bentonite and humic acid (HA), respectively. The results showed that bipolar arrangement of electrodes with 2 cm gap was the optimal condition in terms of gas flow rate and electrode …

Geotechnical Laboratory Testing For 2-D Fem Analysis Of Geomorphic And Planar Sloped Caps And Covers For Sustainable Mine Refuse Deposition, Sun Hee Park

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis reports the findings of the application of Geomorphic Landform Design principles to the Royal Scot abandoned coarse coal refuse (CCR) pile located in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. The Royal Scot facility has many environmental concerns including severe erosion, acid-mine/rock drainage, and sediment transport. A cap and cover system is proposed to be implemented which incorporates the GLD principles. A two-layer cap and cover system will be used to reclaim the site and return it back to a stable state and reduce the production of acid-mine drainage. The system is composed of a hydraulic barrier composed of compacted CCR, …

The Political Water Web Of The United States, Omar Hammad

Dissertations and Theses

The United States’ water systems are interstate in their nature; these systems are governed by Congressional compact agreements. Water compacts have been influenced by common factors that have reverberated throughout the water-web of the country. These impacts varied in their scale, national level federal regulations, such as the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and recent concerns about climate change are macro-scale influences. Localized drivers such as regional economics and population change are localized impacts. While these concepts and issues influence water compacts as a whole, their impacts occur at different periods, albeit for the same reason. As such, we see …

Issues In Trip Generation Methods For Transportation Impact Estimation Of Land Use Development: A Review And Discussion Of The State-Of-The-Art Approaches, Kristina Marie Currans

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

As agencies develop more robust planning objectives for creating sustainable and livable communities, the research community has continued developing supportive tools and methods to provide more accurate and robust means for estimating transportation impacts for site-level development review. This paper is a review of the state-of-the-art trip generation methods for land use transportation impact estimation. First, it provides an overview of the more recent available and peer-reviewed estimation methods. Second, the authors offer a discussion of the successes of state-of-the-art approaches using common themes of research to identify corresponding consistency with theories of travel behavior and urban economics. These themes …

Accessibility, Income, And Person Trip Generation: Multilevel Model Of Activity At Food Retail Establishments In Portland, Oregon, Kristina Marie Currans, Kelly Clifton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

In the past decade, the methods for estimating multimodal transportation impacts of urban land use development have improved substantially. One assumption commonly made in these new methods is that overall person-trip rates at similarly-sized establishments of the same land use do not vary across a region. This is an assumption of convenience to permit the adjustment of ITE Trip Generation vehicle trip rates for use in different urban environments. However, this assumption is inconsistent with theories of urban economics, which recognize that businesses pay a premium to locate in areas with high levels of accessibility to attract more customers. In …

Coupling Of Sea Level And Tidal Range Changes, With Implications For Future Water Levels, Adam T. Devlin, David A. Jay, Stefan Talke, Edward D. Zaron, Jiayi Pan, Hui Lin

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Are perturbations to ocean tides correlated with changing sea-level and climate, and how will this affect high water levels? Here, we survey 152 tide gauges in the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea and statistically evaluate how the sum of the four largest tidal constituents, a proxy for the highest astronomical tide (HAT), changes over seasonal and interannual time scales. We find that the variability in HAT is significantly correlated with sea-level variability; approximately 35% of stations exhibit a greater than ±50 mm tidal change per meter sea-level fluctuation. Focusing on a subset of three stations with long records, probability …

Bioaccessibility Of Lead From Lead-Contaminated Soil Upon Phosphate Amendment Using A Physiologically-Based Extraction Test, Samantha Jo Dicenso

Masters Theses

"Lead is known to cause health problems in humans, especially children, and an effective in‐situ remediation option has been sought for years. Adding phosphoric acid (PA) to contaminated soil causes a reaction that binds the lead to phosphate to produce pyromorphite (Pb₅(PO₄)₃Cl), a form of lead believed to be non‐bioavailable; however, field trials have given varied results (Bosso et al 2008; Munksgaard and Lottermoser 2011; Tang et al. 2009). One explanation for these results might be the impact of the agent used to raise pH after phosphoric acid addition. In order to examine this explanation soil was collected from the …

Advanced Buffer Materials For Indoor Air Co₂ Control In Commercial Buildings, Pavithra Ethi Rajan

Masters Theses

"The following describes a novel passive approach to control the indoor CO₂ levels in enclosed spaces, primarily focusing on commercial buildings. Amine impregnated silica sorbents were identified as suitable candidates and synthesized; the amine loading ratio was varied to create a range of materials. These samples along with other commercial zeolite candidates have been tested over a range of CO₂ concentrations to determine the CO₂ adsorption capacity in laboratory systems and under simulated room conditions. The research work also focuses on the CO₂ desorption capacity of the candidate adsorbents. The desorption is allowed to occur gradually …

Vegetation Based Assessment And Monitoring Tools For Landfill Leachate Treatment And Fugitive Plumes, Rahul Sukharia

Masters Theses

"Solid waste and leachate generation from solid waste landfills has a legacy of detrimental and toxic impacts on the environment. Disposal practices are expensive, failure prone and have not been able to keep up with the pace of disposal of toxic compounds. In general, a landfill acts as a "bathtub" with infiltration of water through the landfill cover into the landfill, reacting with the waste and transferring toxic components into the leachate. Irrigating the evapotranspiration (ET) covers with leachate collected from the landfill has been developed and applied. Such methods can keep the leached pollutants in a loop, which reduces …

Coupling Infrastructure Resilience And Flood Risk Assessment For A Coastal Urban Watershed, Justin Joyce

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis sheds light on coupling potential flood risk and drainage infrastructure resilience of low-lying areas of a coastal urban watershed to flood hazards and subsequent multi-scale impacts of those hazards via detailed modeling frameworks. Physically based models along with statistical models are employed to highlight the complexity for characterizing flood risk while evaluating such risk under various levels of adaptive capacity from traditional flood management techniques to low impact development (LID), as a first step to conduct resilience assessment. Findings indicate that the coupling flood risk and infrastructure resilience is achievable by the careful formulation of flood risk associated …

Effect Of Inlet Angle From Tributary Into Main Channel, Artuan Mcgee, Moses Karakouzian

AANAPISI Poster Presentations

Open channel flows play a significant role within major metropolitan areas in the removal of excess surface runoff. Main channels are responsible for the removal of all excess surface runoff which are fed by connecting tributaries. Both main channels and tributaries can occur naturally or be manmade but their orientation must be considered in the removal of excess surface run off. It is believed that the angle in which the tributaries connect to the main channel is an important factor in whether the run off is removed efficiently or a major contributor to flooding. Current practice requires tributaries in flood …

Tunable Nanocomposite Membranes For Water Remediation And Separations, Sebastián Hernández Sierra

Theses and Dissertations--Chemical and Materials Engineering

Nano-structured material fabrication using functionalized membranes with polyelectrolytes is a promising research field for water pollution, catalytic and mining applications. These responsive polymers react to external stimuli like temperature, pH, radiation, ionic strength or chemical composition. Such nanomaterials provide novel hybrid properties and can also be self-supported in addition to the membranes.

Polyelectrolytes (as hydrogels) have pH responsiveness. The hydrogel moieties gain or lose protons based on the pH, displaying swelling properties. These responsive materials can be exploited to synthesize metal nanoparticles in situ using their functional groups, or to immobilize other polyelectrolytes and biomolecules. Due to their properties, these …

Linking Climate Change And Socio-Economic Impact For Long-Term Urban Growth In Three Mega-Cities, Qi Lu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Urbanization has become a global trend under the impact of population growth, socio-economic development, and globalization. However, the interactions between climate change and urban growth in the context of economic geography are unclear due to missing links in between the recent planning megacities. This study aims to conduct a multi-temporal change analysis of land use and land cover in New York City, City of London, and Beijing using a cellular automata-based Markov chain model collaborating with fuzzy set theory and multi-criteria evaluation to predict the city's future land use changes for 2030 and 2050 under the background of climate change. …

Biological Nutrient Removal (Bnr) Process Optimization And Recovery Of Embedded Energy Using Biodiesel By-Product, Sultan Salamah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) as well as biological nitrogen removal require a carbon source to be carried out. Volatile fatty acid (VFAs) (mainly acetic and propionic acids) are the major driving force for EBPR. Many domestic wastewaters have an insufficient amount of VFAs. However, carbon sources such as acetic and propionic acids can be produced using primary solids fermentation process. Due to the cost of VFA production, an external carbon source can be added to the biological nutrient removal (BNR) system that can be fermented to provide the desired VFAs. Glycerol (biodiesel by-product) offers a solution to reduce carbon …

Reducing Sulfuric Acid Pretreatment In A Nanofiltration Process Treating Surficial Groundwater, Carlyn Higgins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nanofiltration (NF) is a pressure driven membrane process employed in drinking water treatment that requires pretreatment for reliable operation. The objective of this research was to determine if NF membranes can proficiently operate with a decreased or eliminated dose of sulfuric acid pretreatment. When used as pretreatment, sulfuric acid prevents calcium carbonate scaling on NF membranes, yet is costly, hazardous, and imparts high sulfate concentrations to NF feed and concentrate streams. To conduct this research, a 0.324 million gallon per day (MGD) NF pilot plant was operated for 3,855 run-hours at a flux rate of 15 gallons per square foot-day. …

Air Injection As A Scour Countermeasure At Bridge Piers, Ravi Teja Reddy Tippireddy

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Local scour is a major cause of concern for the stability of bridge piers and the safety of the public using the bridges. Structural countermeasures and flow-altering devices have been developed to deal with local scour. Many armoring structural countermeasures are very effective and efficient in clear water conditions but are susceptible to moving bed forms and leaching. The flow-altering devices are effective in both clear water conditions and moving bed forms, but are prone to clogging, less efficient in changing flow direction, etc. This study aims to reduce the local scour by injecting air in order to reduce the …

Characterization Of Kinetics And Performance In A Microbial Fuel Cell Supplied With Synthetic Landfill Leachate, Zhimin Song

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Biodegradable municipal solid waste (MSW) is rich in biochemical energy; however, much of this energy is sequestered in conventional landfills. Although bioreactor landfills enhance conversion of MSW to methane, the generated methane is a potent greenhouse gas and cannot be fully captured in landfills. Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) can directly convert the biochemical energy in MSW to electricity, treat leachate, extend landfill longevity, and minimize fugitive methane emissions. However, the electricity production from MFCs cannot yet meet the energy demands of treatment and improvements in the performance of leachate-fed MFCs are needed. Effective approaches for the design and operation of …