Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Modeling Distributed Source Control Infrastructure At Neighborhood Scale For Mitigating Flood Risk In Amite River Watershed, Ahmad Amin Shefai

LSU Master's Theses

Flooding has always been a major threat to mankind. This is particularly true in urban areas due to urbanization-induced increasing impervious areas and subsequent increasing urban surface runoff, causing an increasing flooding risk to urban areas in spite of the fact that extensive flood control infrastructure has been constructed. The overall goal of this thesis is to present a distributed source control infrastructure-based approach for mitigating the flood risk. The new flood mitigation approach is demonstrated through the model implementation of a series of distributed source control infrastructure systems in the city of Denham Springs at a neighborhood scale. The …

P-Cresol Biogenesis During Bioremediation Aimed At Stimulating Chlorinated Solvent Dehalogenation, Alexis Gathings

LSU Master's Theses

The broad goal of the research described in this thesis was to better understand the potential for biologically mediated production of p-cresol in groundwater at a Superfund site located in south Louisiana. Previous literature reports that microorganisms known to carry out the transformation from L-tyrosine to p-cresol occur in diverse environments.

In the research described in this thesis, studies were conducted utilizing groundwater from the Superfund site during the course of enhanced in situ bioremediation practices aimed at stimulating reductive dehalogenation of chlorinated solvent contamination. Microbial communities established with groundwater sampled from the Superfund site were observed to …

Understanding Air Pollutants And Meteorology Interactions Using Chemical Transport Models, Pengfei Wang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Air pollution is a worldwide threat to human health and ecosystems, especially in developing countries. After being emitted to the atmosphere, air pollutant concentrations are determined by chemical and physical processes including transport, transformation, and deposition, which are largely affected by meteorological variations. In turn, pollutants such as fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) affect meteorology by impacting solar radiation and cloud condensation processes. Thus, it is important and necessary to understand the interactions between air pollutants and meteorology for better designing effective air pollution control strategies and forecasting weather. In this study, two chemical transport models (CTMs) are applied …

The Siltcatcher: A Sediment-Capture System For Wetland Creation And Coastal Protection In Western Lake Pontchartrain, Andrew M. Wright

LSU Master's Theses

The West Lake Pontchartrain region faces a number of long-term environmental challenges due to anthropogenic climate disturbance and landscape modification, including sea level rise, increased storm surge risk, shoreline erosion, and wetland degradation. In response, this thesis applies recent research in the fields of landscape architecture and civil engineering to propose a dynamic, natural-systems solution for wetland creation and shoreline protection. The project envisions a series of breakwater-like structures in western Lake Pontchartrain positioned to slow water released from the nearby Bonnet Carré Spillway, causing suspended sediment to settle and create self-building and self-sustaining wetlands capable of keeping pace with …

Automatic Shoreline Digitization And Mesh Element Sizing For Hydrodynamic Modeling, Henok Kefelegn

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The first and most critical step in any coastal hydrodynamics and transport process modeling is identifying land-water boundaries. In a coastal wetland, this has always been a challenge due to the complexity of the wetland and lack of efficient methods, calling for efficient and effective methods to extract and digitize the shorelines. While coastline feature extraction has been increasingly researched, its application in hydrodynamic and environmental modeling, without morphological adjustment, remains limited and suboptimal. Further, there has been a paucity of cost-effective, contextually adaptive and high-quality methods to generate meshes, especially for coastal hydrodynamic modeling. This study has developed and …