Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Properties Of Cement Mortar Containing Recycled High-Density Polyethylene (Hdpe), Amany G. Micheal Prof., Esraa Torky, Merna Amir

Centre for Advanced Materials

Millions of tones of plastic waste are generated globally and only less than 10 per cent has been recycled. It is crucial to segregate and circulate plastic waste and repurposing it for countless other uses. There are many ways to repurpose and reuse these discarded plastics. One use that can be examined is the use of plastic as partial sand replacement in mortar. To contribute to this important and valid discourse, the research studies the mechanical and thermal properties of recycled HDPE mortar as an active way of integrating plastic waste into the construction industry to partially eliminate some of …

Survey Data: Optimising Retrofitted Insulation For Irish Residential Building Walls, Rakshit D. Muddu, Aimee Byrne, Anthony Robinson Dr.

Datasets

A survey was conducted to determine the preferred set point temperature and heating pattern among Irish households. The survey was sent to 237 people living across Ireland, out of which 32 respondents skipped the survey and 9 surveys were found to be incomplete. Amongst the counties in Ireland 71.1% respondents were from Dublin, 6.34% from Kildare, 5% from Meath, 5% from Wicklow and in all the remaining counties response rate was below 2%. Part 1: This section of the survey recorded information regarding characteristics of the building such as house type, wall type, insulation type, period the house was built. …

Plural Communities: A Cultural Mapping Project + A Framework Plan For Cherokee Village, Arkansas, Community Design Center

Community Design Center Project Reports

What do urban designers do with culture? How might we redevelop a mid-century modern planned community through the mapping of cultural influences that shaped it? We explored memory and heritage central to cultural mapping and its participatory-based forms of public inquiry. 54 drawings integrate maps, folklore materials, archived media, photographs, and new drawings into five synchronic cultural frameworks that shaped Cherokee Village—Native American heritage, Ozark pioneer and folk heritage, camping and scouting, midcentury planned communities, and regional modernism in design and planning.

Cherokee Village was developed within a mid-twentieth century planning ethos that valued uniformity …

Occurrence, Fate, And Transport Of Microplastics From Wastewater Treatment Plants To Receiving Waters, Rayyan Mirza

Wayne State University Dissertations

Environmental pollution due to the widespread presence of microplastics (MPs) is an emerging global problem. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are considered a significant point source for MPs. The first aim of this study was to develop extraction and detection methods of MPs from complex wastewater and sludge samples in the Detroit WWTP to understand the occurrence and fate of MPs in WWTPs. The second aim was to understand the spatial and temporal distribution of MPs originating from the Detroit WWTP discharge point into the Detroit River by utilizing the Mike 21 Flow Model FM to simulate the movement of MPs …

Optimal Spatial Design Of Groundwater Level Monitoring Networks Using Machine Learning Methods, Sadaf Teimoori

Wayne State University Dissertations

Groundwater plays a crucial role in sustaining ecosystems, providing drinking water, and supporting various industrial activities. As water scarcity becomes an increasingly pressing global issue, accurate groundwater level monitoring is essential for effective resource management and environmental protection. The study introduces a comprehensive methodology that integrates groundwater flow modeling, stochastic simulations, and ML algorithms to design efficient Groundwater Level Monitoring Networks (GLMNs) in regions with limited groundwater observation data. Two primary ML algorithms, K-means clustering and Relevance Vector Machine (RVM), are used to select and position observation wells strategically. The research addresses the challenge of minimizing data uncertainties and determining …

Nebraska Water Center Annual Report 2023, Nebraska Water Center, Daugherty Water For Food Global Institute

Nebraska Water Center: Administrative Materials

The report's highlights updates including the water sciences laboratory, AltEn contamination monitoring and the Know your well project.

Application Of Metagenomic And Molecular Microbiology Techniques To Elucidate Sources Of Fecal Pollution And Anthropogenic Antibiotic Resistance Genes To Surface Water: A Step Towards A “One Health” Approach To Watershed Management, Mehedi Hasan Tarek

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The use of fecal indicator bacteria, such as Escherichia coli, is a widely established regulatory and monitoring practice to detect surface water contamination associated with fecal pollution. However, the detection or quantification of fecal indicator bacteria alone does not accurately inform the sources of fecal pollution. The development of molecular and metagenomic methods that target the DNA of microorganisms has resulted in a host of new tools for monitoring fecal pollution and its sources, as well as for understanding emerging microbial threats, such as antimicrobial resistance. Antimicrobial resistance is a critical “One Health” challenge presenting a high risk to …

Comparing Hydrogen Peroxide And Sodium Perborate Ultraviolet Advanced Oxidation Processes For 1,4-Dioxane Removal From Wastewater Effluent, Tulsi Shukla

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Ultraviolet advanced oxidation processes were compared using sodium perborate (UV/NaBO3 AOP) or hydrogen peroxide (UV/H2O2 AOP) for 1,4-dioxane removal from tertiary wastewater effluent. Both UV/H2O2 and UV/NaBO3 AOPs were also tested with the addition of acetic acid. Results revealed that sodium perborate performed similarly to hydrogen peroxide – the UV/NaBO3 AOP with 6 milligrams per liter (mg/L) as H2O2 resulted in 43.9 percent 1,4-dioxane removal, while an equivalent UV/H2O2 AOP showed 42.8 percent removal. Although the oxidants performed similarly, NaBO3 is an average of 3.3 times more expensive than H2O2. However, the solid form of NaBO3 can provide a major …

Exploring A Lab-Scale Cascade Upflow Bioreactor System For Nitrogen Removal Via Biosorption Activated Media, Alejandra Robles Lecompte

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024

Many Best Management Practices (BMPs) have been developed to reduce excessive nutrients in stormwater runoff and mitigate harmful algal blooms in downstream receiving water bodies. This study demonstrates a new BMP by comparing two green sorption media (i.e., specialty adsorbents) for nutrient removal in cascade upflow biofiltration systems operated in parallel. The proposed filtration technology can control hydraulic gradients, prevent clogging and settlements, and increase hydraulic loading while removing more nutrients in an integrated physicochemical and microbiological treatment process. The two green sorption media being tested in this study include zero-valent-iron and perlite-based green sorption media (ZIPGEM) and biochar, iron, …

Complab V1.0: A Scalable Pore-Scale Model For Flow, Biogeochemistry, Microbial Metabolism, And Biofilm Dynamics, Heewon Jung, Hyun-Seob Song, Christof Meile

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Microbial activity and chemical reactions in porous media depend on the local conditions at the pore scale and can involve complex feedback with fluid flow and mass transport. We present a modeling framework that quantitatively accounts for the interactions between the bio(geo)chemical and physical processes and that can integrate genome-scale microbial metabolic information into a dynamically changing, spatially explicit representation of environmental conditions. The model couples a lattice Boltzmann implementation of Navier–Stokes (flow) and advection–diffusion-reaction (mass conservation) equations. Reaction formulations can include both kinetic rate expressions and flux balance analysis, thereby integrating reactive transport modeling and systems biology. We also …

Evaluation Of Cytocompatability And Safety Of Nerve Retraction Compounds For Local Disc Denervation To Treat Disc-Associated Low Back Pain, Fei San Lee, Uyen N. Nguyen, Rebecca A. Wachs

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Low back pain (LBP) is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Aberrant nerve growth into intervertebral discs is a common pathological feature of disc-associated LBP. Current treatments rely on short-term solutions using opioids or anti-inflammatory prescriptions which can lead to addiction and side effects, respectively. We hypothesize that removal of aberrant nerve fibers in the disc using nerve retraction compounds can alleviate discassociated LBP. We performed screening of nerve retraction compounds using adult rat dorsal root ganglia (DRG) explant culture in hydrogels to mimic disc innervation in vitro. Capsaicin, known to induce nerve retraction, was used as a positive control …

A Methodology To Optimize Site-Specific Field Capacity And Irrigation Thresholds, Hemendra Kumar, Puneet Srivastava, Jasmeet Lamba, Bruno Lena, Efstathios Diamantopoulos, Brenda Ortiz, Bijoychandra Takhellambam, Guilherme Morata, Luca Bondesan

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

The determination of field capacity (FC), irrigation thresholds, and irrigation amounts is characterized by site-specific soil hydraulic properties (SHPs). This study, conducted in two zones (zone 1 and zone 2) delineated based on soil, topography, and historical crop yield in Alabama (USA), focused on determining zone-specific FC using negligible drainage flux (q_fc) criterion. The HYDRUS-1D model was used to optimize zone-specific SHPs using measured soil matric potential (h). The zone-specific FCs were determined using optimized and raw SHPs at 0.01 cm/day as q_fc. The results showed that the optimized FC at q_{fc …}

Agricultural Machinery Operator Monitoring System (Ag-Oms): A Machine Learning Approach For Real-Time Operator Safety Assessment, Terence Irumva, Herve Mwunguzi, Santosh Pitla, Bethany Lowndes, Aaron Yoder, Ka-Chun Siu

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

The 2015 CS-CASH (Central States Center for Agricultural Safety and Health, 2015) Injury Surveillance Surveys showed that around 19% of injuries to agricultural producers are related to tractors or large agricultural machinery, yet only a limited number of studies are found that address tools and methods for monitoring safety behaviors of agricultural machinery operators in real-time. The current safety behavior monitoring approaches require an in-person presence, which can be both time- and cost-inefficient, and the other available methods lack a feedback element to alert operators in realtime. As a result, the research presented in this study aimed to develop an …

Goniometer In The Air: Enabling Brdf Measurement Of Crop Canopies Using A Cable-Suspended Plant Phenotyping Platform, Geng Bai, Yufeng Ge, Bryan Leavitt, John Gamon, David Scoby

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

The Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) quantifies the distribution of the spectral reflectance of a target surface at various viewing and illumination angles. In-field measurement of the BRDF of vegetation canopies improves the characterization of offnadir measurements and informs radiative transfer models of canopy reflectance, where the Lambertian assumption does not hold. However, current field goniometers are unable to measure BRDF efficiently, especially for tall vegetation across the growing season because of the limitations of clearance, field accessibility, and flexibility of the sensor field of view. In this study, we explored the potential of using a large-scale cable-suspended field phenotyping …

Comparing Phosphorus Removal Efficiencies And Mechanisms Via Two Cost-Effective Specialty Adsorbents In A Cascade Upflow Filtration System, Sydney Kilgus-Vesely

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Finding solutions to treat water that contains phosphorus is an important effort due to the harmful impacts it presents to both human health and the environment. Phosphorus is considered a limiting factor in water oftentimes and therefore controls the growth of algal bloom in a water body. The increase of algal populations due to wastewater effluent, stormwater runoff, and agricultural discharge in Florida waters has a direct link to the event of harmful algal blooms such as red tide in coastal regions, eutrophication of waterbodies, and fish kills. Finding low cost, energy efficient, and low maintenance green sorption media (GSM) …

Developing Cost-Effective Specialty Adsorbents To Meet The Emerging Challenges Of Pollutant Removal In Surface Water Systems, Diana Ordonez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The production of clean water is emphasized under the United Nations goals for sustainable development (SDGs), enlightening the acute need of developing new sustainable technologies in all disciplines. SDGs have urged all engineers in the 21st century to mitigate pollution of drinking water sources and prevent all receiving waterbodies from the impact of agriculture discharge, wastewater effluent, and stormwater runoff. Current water matrix constituents of concern include traditional pollutants (i.e., total nitrogen and total phosphate), natural organic matters (i.e., total organic carbon (TOC), tannic acid), heavy metals (i.e., copper, calcium), and harmful algae toxins (i.e., microcystin), as well as contaminants …

New York State Waste Characterization, David J. Tonjes, Sameena Manzur, Yiyi Wang, Mohammad Rahman, Firman Firmansyah, Krista L. Thyberg, Elizabeth Heiwtt

Technology & Society Faculty Publications

Analysis of sampling results from 25 tons of MSW and recyclables sorted across New York State at 11 locations in 2021 found that the composition of the wastes were different from place to place even when measured by mean data for each location.

Parameter by parameter analyses found that recyclables comprise from approximately 18% (a narrow definition of recyclables) to 23% (a broader definition of recyclables) of disposed wastes. Paper tends to be the greatest element in the disposed waste stream, although food waste is the largest single component. Plastics are also a very large part of the disposed waste …

การประเมินประสิทธิภาพของอาคารเขียว: กรณีศึกษาในกรุงเทพมหานครและปริมณฑล, นภัสสร แพรกอุดม

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

งานวิจัยฉบับนี้มีจุดประสงค์เพื่อประเมินประสิทธิภาพด้านคุณภาพของสภาวะแวดล้อมภายในอาคารของอาคารเขียวและอาคารสำนักงานทั่วไปในกรุงเทพมหานครและปริมณฑล และประเมินค่าใช้จ่ายด้านการใช้พลังงานของระบบระบายอากาศและระบบปรับอากาศภายในอาคาร โดยดำเนินการตรวจวัดทั้งเชิงวัตถุวิสัยและตรวจวัดเชิงอัตวิสัย ภายในอาคารเขียว 3 อาคาร และอาคารสำนักงานทั่วไป 1 อาคาร โดยใช้เครื่องมือตรวจวัดคุณภาพอากาศภายในอาคารและแบบสอบถาม จากการศึกษาแสดงให้เห็นว่ามีความแตกต่างกันของผลการตรวจวัดอย่างมีนัยสำคัญหว่างอาคารเขียว และผลการตรวจวัดในบางอาคารเกินค่าเฝ้าระวังฯ โดยเฉพาะ PM2.5 (16.67-40.26 µg/m3) เนื่องจากมลพิษภายนอกอาคารและพฤติกรรมของผู้ใช้อาคาร ผลจากแบบประเมินแสดงให้เห็นว่าผู้ใช้อาคารส่วนมากพึงพอใจกับคุณภาพของสภาวะแวดล้อมโดยรวม ส่วนข้อมูลผลกระทบทางสุขภาพวิเคราะห์โดยใช้ Odd Ratio พบว่า ผู้ใช้อาคารที่มีระดับมลพิษสูงมีโอกาสเกิดอาการทางสุขภาพมากกว่าผู้ใช้อาคารที่ได้รับสัมผัสในระดับที่ต่ำกว่า ในส่วนของค่าไฟฟ้าจากระบบปรับอากาศ อาคารสำนักงานทั่วไปมีค่าสูงที่สุดเมื่อเปรียบเทียบกับอาคารเขียว โดยการบริหารจัดการอาคารที่ไม่เหมาะสมและนโยบายการประหยัดพลังงานที่ไม่มีประสิทธิภาพอาจส่งผลกรทบต่อคุณภาพของสภาวะแวดล้อมภายในอาคารให้แย่ลงได้ โดยสรุป คุณภาพอากาศภายนอกอาคารและพฤติกรรมของผู้ใช้อาคารเป็นปัจจัยสำคัญที่ส่งผลกระทบต่อประสิทธิภาพของอาคารในด้านคุณภาพของสภาวะแวดล้อมภายในอาคารของอาคารเขียวได้

Développement De Stratégie Visant À Contrôler Le Niveau De Contamination Des Piscines Par Les Sous-Produits De Désinfection, Maximilien Debia, Elham Ahmadpour, Isabelle Valois, Sami Haddad, Robert Tardif, Stéphane Hallé, Hélène Proulx, Manuel Rodriguez, François Proulx, Ianis Delpla, Jean Sérodes, Sabrina Simard

Rapports de recherche scientifique

La présence de sous-produits de désinfection dans l’eau et l’air des piscines intérieures est une problématique de santé publique et de santé au travail. L’exposition aux sous-produits de désinfection et notamment à la trichloramine est associée à différents effets délétères comme l’irritation des voies respiratoires, l’irritation oculaire et l’hyperréactivité bronchique. La présence des sous-produits de désinfection résulte des réactions chimiques qui surviennent entre les agents désinfectants ajoutés et les matières organiques ou azotées présentes naturellement dans l’eau ou qui y sont amenées par les baigneurs.

L’objectif général de recherche visait à améliorer les connaissances sur les pratiques de gestion et …

Novel Nickel-Loaded Activated Carbon Cathodes For Hydrogen Production In Microbial Electrolysis Cells, Daniel Alejandro Moreno Jimenez

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) can electrochemically produce green hydrogen from waste streams. Although MECs are excellent options for implementing an energy recovery process while treating wastewater, the cathode side still hinders practical applications. Platinum (Pt) has been the top reference for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in MECs, however, Pt is not practical due to the high capital cost. Inexpensive nickel-loaded activated carbon (Ni/AC) cathodes were recently developed for replacing Pt in MECs and have shown comparable performance to Pt. This dissertation aims to breakthrough the current cathode challenges regarding the catalytic activity, manufacturing, and operational concept toward a cost-competitive scaling-up …