Engineering Commons^™

Sustainability Of Water And Wastewater Infrastructure: Using A Public-Private Partnership Model For Project Financial Assessment, Rebecca Werner Trotter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To supplement current and future budget shortfalls for improvements to water and wastewater infrastructure, Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs or P3) are being advocated by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and others as a practical mechanism to ensure financial sustainability. A PPP involves a partnership between a government entity and a concessionaire--consisting of one or more private companies acting as a single, private incorporation--who make an agreement on funding, building, and operating a usually government-provided service, such as drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. This is different from a traditional contract between a government entity and a contractor because the concessionaire …

Slides: Impacts Of Energy Deficits In Cooking, Illumination, Water, Sanitation, And Motive Power, Paul S. Chinowsky

2012 Energy Justice Conference and Technology Exposition (September 17-18)

Presenter: Dr. Paul Chinowsky, Director, Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities; Professor, University of Colorado

25 slides

Water Mass Balances For The Rio Grande/Bravo From Fort Quitman, Texas To Foster Ranch Near Langtry, Texas: An Assessment Of Factors, Ramiro Lujan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Water availability is declining in many regions of the planet, particularly in arid and semi-arid regions. Water bodies located in these regions, like the Rio Grande/Bravo at the U.S. - Mexico border, are subjected to high water demands. This research project makes an assessment of the spatial and temporal variability of elements intervening in the water mass balance for the section of the Rio Grande/Bravo between Fort Quitman and Langtry, Texas during the time period extending from January 1990 through December 2005. This document mentions the main Rio Grande/Bravo stakeholders from the U.S. and Mexico, and describes issues related …

Portable Solar Desalination System, Genaro Sanchez, Alan Galarza, Erick Del Real

Electrical Engineering

Clean water and reliable energy can be difficult to obtain in remote locations such as desert villages, secluded islands, and other places where no fresh water can be found. The primary goal for this project is address these problems by implementing a portable desalinization plant system that is to be powered by solar energy PV system as the main energy source.

Effect Of Fullerene Nano-Spheres On Evaporation Kinetics Of Fluids, Wenhu Wang

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

As the interest in fluid evaporation kinetics keeps increasing, it's inevitably noticed that fullerene nanospheres play an important role on it. In this study, we investigate the C60 nanospheres' effect on the evaporation kinetics and thermal transitions of different solvents (water, chlorobenzene) over the entire range of solubility. According to distinct polarity of different solvent, fullerene solution would behave differently, the trend of increasing in evaporation rate as the concentration increased was observed in aromatic solvents while the rate kept decreasing in water. The result of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and Raman spectroscopy provided an evidence about structuring in water …

Criticality Studies Of Actinides Within Fissures, Trevor Wilcox

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The storage of nuclear waste in underground storage facilities presents numerous engineering challenges and risks. Experimental verification of engineered underground storage is impractical or prohibitively expensive, leaving scientists with few options. A 1995 report by Bowman and Venneri of the Los Alamos National Laboratory generated considerable controversy by hypothesizing that wastes composed of fissionable plutonium leached from underground storage containers could pose a nuclear criticality hazard. They proposed cases where plutonium collected in underground fractures could lead to sustained nuclear fission. In overmoderated cases, they argued that the resulting release of energy from fission could result in steam explosions, or …

A Water And Wastewater Sector Performance Assessment: A Comparative Study, Reham Khalifa

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The water and wastewater sector has been one of the infrastructure sectors gaining increasing importance recently. Governments have been focusing major efforts and significant volumes of their budgets towards the improvement of this sector and the increase of water and wastewater coverage. The key problem in most of the water_and wastewater utilities is the absence of performance assessment tools.

This research utilizes the calculation of a group of financial and operational indicators for a sample size of 234 utilities from countries across the world as a mean of comparison of their performance. Egypt is represented in the sample size by …