Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Solar And Rain Catching Canopy. Urban Oasis, Afolabi Ibitoye, Langston Clark, Elena Zimareva, Evan Banks, Alexander Aptekar

Publications and Research

The Urban Oasis is designed to work within existing “pocket parks” in New York City as a combined rainwater collector, personal electronics charging station and resting designation for New Yorkers. Intended to not only lessen the demand on the city power grid by using renewable energy to charge devices, the urban oasis is also intended to mitigate grey water overfill in New York’s combined sewer system and, in general, serve as a model for responsible environmental stewardship in urban areas.

The important technical aspects of the canopy specifically analyzed were:

a) how much rainwater could the canopy be expected to …

Executive Summary_Feasibility Of Harbor-Wide Barrier Systems: Preliminary Analysis For Boston Harbor, Paul Kirshen

Sustainable Solutions Lab

This report presents a preliminary feasibility assessment of harbor-wide barrier systems designed to protect Boston Harbor from coastal flooding caused by sea level rise (SLR) and storm surges. Conducted by the Sustainable Solutions Lab at the University of Massachusetts Boston and supported by the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, the study evaluates two primary configurations: an Outer Harbor Barrier (OHB) and an Inner Harbor Barrier (IHB). Using hydrodynamic modeling, economic cost-benefit analysis, and social vulnerability assessments, the study finds that while both barrier systems may reduce risk from extreme storm events, they do not mitigate regular tidal flooding without frequent gate …

Assessment And Optimization Of Environmental Systems Using Data Analysis And Simulation., Milad Ebrahimi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For most environmental systems, specifically wastewater treatment plants and aquifers, a significant number of performance data variables are attained on a time series basis. Due to the interconnectedness of the variables, it is often difficult to assess over-arching trends and quantify temporal operational performance. The objective of this research study was to provide an effective means for comprehensive temporal evaluation of environmental systems. The proposed methodology used several multivariate data analyses and statistical techniques to present an assessment framework for the water quality monitoring programs as well as optimization of treatment plants and aquifer systems. The developed procedure considered the …

Feasibility Of Harbor-Wide Barrier Systems: Preliminary Analysis For Boston Harbor, Paul Kirshen

Sustainable Solutions Lab

This report presents a preliminary feasibility assessment of harbor-wide barrier systems designed to protect Boston Harbor from coastal flooding caused by sea level rise (SLR) and storm surges. Conducted by the Sustainable Solutions Lab at the University of Massachusetts Boston and supported by the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, the study evaluates two primary configurations: an Outer Harbor Barrier (OHB) and an Inner Harbor Barrier (IHB). Using hydrodynamic modeling, economic cost-benefit analysis, and social vulnerability assessments, the study finds that while both barrier systems may reduce risk from extreme storm events, they do not mitigate regular tidal flooding without frequent gate …

Development Of A Hydraulic Conductivity Placement Window Using Centrifuge Techniques, Greg Thomas

Civil Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

A centrifuge soil testing device, currently operated by researchers at the University of Arkansas, was used to develop a technique to determine a hydraulic conductivity placement window. The purpose of this research was to develop a placement window by means of a centrifuge instead of by means of a panel board. Soil specimens were created at standard PRcotor energy and at 50 percent of Standard Proctor energy at -3 percent of optimum, -1.5 percent of optimum, two specimens at optimum, +1.5 percent of optimum, and +3 percent of optimum water content. Values of hydraulic conductivity for the respective specimens were …

Introduction To Infrastructure - The Influence Of Natural Disasters On Infrastructure, Tri Tam Nguyen, Sean M. Raday, Daniel Leverick

STEM Student Research Symposium Posters

In this paper, three major hurricanes in 2017 were examined to determine the damage these hurricanes have done to the infrastructure. Infrastructure has an important role in the nation’s sustained economic development. Infrastructure consists of two main types which are “hard” infrastructure and “soft” infrastructure. Hard infrastructure is the physical networks which include transportation, power, etc. while soft infrastructure is institutions and human capital. Inadequate and inefficient performance of “hard” or “soft” infrastructure would prevent economy from achieving full growth. In the past decades, a significant increase in the number of natural disasters has had great impact on infrastructure systems. …

Rainwater Harvesting System Scenario Analysis On Runoff Reduction Potential In Surabaya, Indonesia: A Geospatial Analysis For Brantas Hilir Watershed, Putri Sukmahartati

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Global warming has become an environmental concern over the past several decades and its impact on the water cycle is very crucial to the well-being of the human population. In the hydrological cycle, water evaporates by the heat of the sun and atmosphere, where it is accumulated in the atmosphere via clouds and it then falls as rain. With warmer temperatures, more intensive evaporation and downpours occur. In addition, impervious surfaces are increasing as a result of urban development. Those surfaces cause more water to flow faster into open water bodies, creating more extensive flooding, and additionally reducing water quality. …

Hawai'i Wildlife Fund V. County Of Maui, Lowell J. Chandler

Public Land & Resources Law Review

In Hawai’i Wildlife Fund v. County of Maui, the Ninth Circuit held that the plain language of the Clean Water Act provides jurisdiction over indirect discharges of pollutants from a point source into groundwater that is shown to be connected to navigable waters. The court found that studies confirmed pollutants entering the Pacific Ocean were fairly traceable to the County of Maui’s sewage disposal wells. In affirming the district court’s ruling, the Ninth Circuit held that Maui County violated the Clean Water Act by discharging pollutants into a navigable water without the required permit. The court also concluded the …

Techno-Economic And Life Cycle Assessment Of Hydrothermal Processing Of Microalgae For Biofuels And Co-Product Generation, Andrew P. Bessette

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Traditional processing methods of algae to biofuels require dewatering after harvesting of the algae before the lipids can be extracted. This is typically the most energy intensive and therefore the most expensive step. Old Dominion University (ODU) has successfully utilized a flash hydrolysis (a kind of hydrothermal) process where proteins are solubilized into the liquid phase of product and the remainder lipid-rich, low nitrogen product is separated into a solid phase. The solid phase (lipid-rich) is then an ideal candidate for biofuel feedstock and the liquid phase, or hydrolysate, can be used for coproducts such as a source of nutrients …

Artificial Recharge Of Groundwater As A Management Tool For The Kabul Basin, Afghanistan, Mohammad Farid Masoom

LSU Master's Theses

Decades of war and political instability, consecutive droughts, population increase and displacement, caused serious infrastructural damages to water resources of Afghanistan. The main source of water supply for people in Afghanistan is groundwater. However, over-exploitation of groundwater has led to groundwater level declines in most parts of the country. Kabul, the largest city of Afghanistan, is the capital city with a population of 4.5 million and the fifth fastest-growing city in the world. The city has observed groundwater level declines of 5-10 meters (m) since 1980. Decline of about 30 m has also been observed in one of the monitoring …

Spot-R By Triax, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Triax’s Spot-r system was developed to tackle the construction industry’s unique safety and productivity challenges, stemming from a demonstrated lack of total jobsite visibility and automatically collected, easily accessible field data. Spot-r by Triax combines a proprietary mesh network with sensor technology to record and transmit previously unattainable workforce and equipment location, activity and safety data within a defined area – all in real-time.

The Spot-r network is installed around the site and operates in a 900 MHz network, with a subset using a cellular connection to forward Spot-r sensor data to Triax’s custom, cloud dashboard. In the hazardous construction …

Exploring The Determinants Of Vulnerable Road Users’ Crash Severity In State Roads, Álvaro Caviedes

PSU Transportation Seminars

Part of the Student Presentations from TRB

Pedestrians and bicyclists are the most vulnerable road users and suffer the most severe consequences when crashes take place. An extensive literature is available for crash severity in terms of driver safety, but fewer studies have explored non-motorized users’ crash severity. Furthermore, most research efforts have examined pedestrian and bicyclist crash severity in urban areas. This study focuses on state roads (mostly outside major urban areas) and aims to identify contributing risk factors of fatal and severe crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists in state roads. The results seem to suggest that besides improvements …

Purdue’S Biowall, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Mechanical ventilation, energy recovery ventilation, and infiltration (air that leaks into a building) are commonly used to introduce fresh air. These are all valid approaches, but a living plant-based filter is an innovative complement to these traditional technologies. A Biowall has the potential to improve indoor air quality while reducing the quantity of air needed for ventilation, creating the potential for energy savings. Figure 1 shows a Biowall prototype being evaluated in the ReNEWW House, a research home located near the Purdue University campus (http://www.renewwhouse.com/).

Mdp (Machine Drive Power) Intelligent Compaction Technology, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets Archive

Caterpillar developed MDP (Machine Drive Power) technology to fill this gap. Rather than an accelerometer and vibratory drum, it uses the principle of rolling resistance to provide indications of soil stiffness. This allows it to perform more reliably on cohesive and granular soils with less variability than accelerometer systems. It also means that the technology can be used on both vibratory and static drum compactors, which are often used on larger sites. While the technology is quite useful on its own, it is even better as a complementary technology to the existing accelerometer-based systems. Contractors who use vibratory soil compactors …

Where There Is No Engineer Chapter 06, Liam Mccarton, Sean O'Hogain

Books/Book Chapters

This chapter summarises the learning outcomes from the design program.

Mechanistic Insight Into The Degradation Of Nitrosamines Via Aqueous-Phase Uv Photolysis Or A Uv-Based Advanced Oxidation Process: Quantum Mechanical Calculations, Daisuke Minakata, Erica Coscarelli

Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering Publications

Nitrosamines are a group of carcinogenic chemicals that are present in aquatic environments that result from byproducts of industrial processes and disinfection products. As indirect and direct potable reuse increase, the presence of trace nitrosamines presents challenges to water infrastructures that incorporate effluent from wastewater treatment. Ultraviolet (UV) photolysis or UV-based advanced oxidation processes that produce highly reactive hydroxyl radicals are promising technologies to remove nitrosamines from water. However, complex reaction mechanisms involving radicals limit our understandings of the elementary reaction pathways embedded in the overall reactions identified experimentally. In this study, we perform quantum mechanical calculations to identify the …

Color Removal And Treatment Of Dye And Sugar Waste Water Using Low Cost Adsorbents, Saisantosh Vamshi Harsha Madiraju

ETD Archive

This study was undertaken to determine the treatment of wastewater from dye and sugar industry for removal of color. This specific treatment consists of adsorption using low cost adsorbents and micro filtration using whatman-41 micro filters. Considerations of this treatment process is to take the samples using batch adsorption and avoid coagulation with further dilution. Numerous runs were made with the ideal waste samples prepared in the laboratory. As a first step in the study different dyes were considered using different concentrations of sugar wastewater. Samples were treated with three different low-cost adsorbents. These treated samples using low cost adsorbents …

Cee 433: Water Technology & Policy Syllabus, University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Ashlynn Stillwell

All ECSTATIC Materials

This document is the syllabus for CEE 433: Water Technology & Policy, by instructor Ashlynn S. Stillwell at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The course is an elective class, open to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students.

Factors Affecting Minimum Dissolved Oxygen Concentration In Streams, Chistopher Robert Huhnke

ETD Archive

Modeling water quality has been shown to be a useful tool in strategizing water quality management. Dissolved oxygen (DO) has one of the largest impacts on water quality compared to other parameters. The purpose of the dissertation research is to generate a regression equation model, using the US EPA QUAL2K model as the base, to determine different factors affecting minimum dissolved oxygen concentrations in streams, to determine the critical distance for the minimum dissolved oxygen concentration, and the magnitude of impact of each parameter. Based on regression analysis, the factors affecting minimum DO in river water are effluent biochemical oxygen …

Adsorption And Microfiltration Processes To Treat Dye And Coffee Wastewater., Abhiram Siva Prasad Pamula

ETD Archive

Wastewater from coffee processing industry creates high biological and chemical oxygen demand in the surface water. In addition to coffee wastewater from coffee industry, dyes from textile industry enter surface water affecting water quality in terms of transmissivity of light. Adsorption is an economical wastewater treatment process to remove color from dye and coffee wastewater. In the current thesis, adsorption using low-cost adsorbents like peanut hull and onion peel are used to treat combined dye and coffee wastewater. Three representative dyes including acid black 48, disperse yellow 3, crystal violet certified with processed coffee is used in preparing batch adsorption …

Analysis Of Micromixers To Minimize Scaling Effects On Reverse Osmosis Membranes, Jeremy Walker

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

ANALYSIS OF MICROMIXERS TO MINIMIZE SCALING EFFECTS ON REVERSE OSMOSIS MEMBRANES

by

Jeremy Walker

December 2018

Advisor: Dr. Shawn McElmurry

Major: Civil Engineering

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Structural elements, typically mesh spacers, are required between membrane leaves in spiral

wound elements to ensure flow through reverse osmosis (RO) modules. The standard diamond-shaped

mesh spacer results in non-ideal hydrodynamics that can lead to fouling, which ultimately reduces the

flux of water through the membrane and the operational life of the unit. Additionally, traditional mesh

feed spacers do not allow for reverse flow cleaning due to obstructed flow paths and, once …

Inertial And Liquefaction-Induced Kinematic Demands On A Pile-Supported Wharf: Physical Modeling, Milad Souri, Arash Khosravifar, Stephen E. Dickenson, Scott Schlechter, Nason Mccullough

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Results of a centrifuge test on a pile-supported wharf were used to investigate the time-, depth-, and row-dependent nature of kinematic and inertial loading on wharf piles in sloping rockfill. P-y models were calibrated against recorded bending moments in different piles and different depths. It was found that full kinematic demands and full superstructure inertia should be combined to estimate bending moments at pile head and shallow depths (less than 10 diameters below the ground surface). On the contrary, it was found that applying full kinematic demands alone was adequate to estimate pile bending moments at large depths (greater than …

The Effects Of Long-Duration Subduction Earthquakes On Inelastic Behavior Of Bridge Pile Foundations Subjected To Liquefaction-Induced Lateral Spreading, Jonathan Nasr, Arash Khosravifar

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Effective-stress nonlinear dynamic analyses (NDA) were performed for a large-diameter reinforced concrete (RC) pile in multi-layered liquefiable sloped ground. The objective was to assess the effects of earthquake duration on the combination of inertia and liquefaction-induced lateral spreading. A parametric study was performed using input motions from subduction and crustal earthquakes covering a wide range of motion durations. The NDA results showed that the pile head displacements increased under liquefied conditions, compared to nonliquefied conditions, due to liquefaction-induced lateral spreading. The NDA results were used to develop a displacement-based equivalent static analysis (ESA) method that combines inertial and lateral spreading …

The Transport Of Non-Spherical Particles In A Simulated Ocean Environment, Hannah Reed

REU Final Reports

Plastic particles contaminating the world’s oceans and accumulating in oceanic gyres has become a ubiquitous problem and the solution involving how to clean up the debris efficiently has still not been found. One particular issue is understanding where the greatest densities of debris may be. It is known that floating trash will tend to accumulate in large circular systems of ocean water called gyres, however these areas span thousands of miles of ocean. The present study aims to understand the transport of anisotropic particles in conditions similar to an oceanic environment using experimental methods in an effort to better predict …

Preferential Pathways For Vapor Intrusion: Site Screening And Field Sampling Of Sewers To Assess Inhalation Exposure Risks, Evan James Willett

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Hazardous waste sites and aging wastewater infrastructure are common in the United States. There are hundreds of thousands of contaminated sites and more than a million miles of sewer pipes. Populations living close to hazardous waste sites often suffer from increased risk of adverse health effects due to exposure to contaminated environmental media. Vapor intrusion is one process by which nearby populations can be exposed to volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Aging wastewater infrastructure is important for vapor intrusion site assessments because sewer pipes can serve as preferential vapor transport pathways. Near contaminated sites, pipe deterioration allows migration of contaminants into …

Numerical Modeling And Isotope Tracers To Investigate Karst Biogeochemistry And Transport Processes, Admin Husic

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

This dissertation investigated the physical and biogeochemical processes affecting the source, fate, and transport of sediment, carbon, and nitrogen within a highly-coupled fluviokarst system. Elemental and isotopic datasets were collected at surface and subsurface locations for both dissolved and particulate contaminant phases, new methodology regarding data collection was presented to the karst research community, an in-cave sediment transport model coupling physical transport with elemental and isotopic mass balances of carbon and nitrogen was formulated, pathway and process control on nitrate leaching from agricultural karst watersheds was assessed, and nitrate mobilization and fractionation were modeled using high frequency storm sampling and …

Evaluation Of Orthophosphate Based Corrosion Inhibitors In Treated Water For El Paso Region, Francisco Solis Jr

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Corrosion is an electrochemical phenomenon that involves the deterioration of a metal by the reaction of itself with its surrounding environment. One of the greatest issues for water utilities around the country is to keep the water quality safe. Corrosion can affect the quality of the water that we use on a daily basis by adding a bad taste, increasing the concentration of heavy metals, and allowing outside contaminants to enter the distribution system. The use of phosphate based corrosion inhibitors was tested in two different metals: iron and copper. The phosphate in the inhibitors react with the calcium in …

Viability Of Graywater Reuse In Lesotho’S Lowland Agricultural District, Ryan Wagner

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Water security has become a large issue with populations rising and weather patterns changing to drier and hotter conditions in southern Africa. Lesotho, a mountainous country landlocked by South Africa, is responsible for a large amount of the rainfall in southern Africa. As such, Lesotho provides water to South Africa in exchange for national economic growth. Lesotho, however, is also prone to droughts and with water reserves being sold to South Africa, water security has become a national issue. This study looked at Lesotho’s current water use habits and found that graywater reuse could lead to much more available water. …

Optimizing Chlorine Disinfection By Chlorine Injection Location And Pipe Diameter Selection In A Water Distribution System, Margaret Neff

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Due to a variety of factors chlorination is common water disinfectant for community-scale distribution systems. The town of Suyo, Peru was already equipped with a gravity fed water system and drip chlorinator which achieved 4-log inactivation of viruses throughout the town, however, it was not providing 3-log inactivation of giardia cysts at all points of the system.

This project used an EPANET model to determine and compare the potential benefits of changes which could be made to the pre-existing water system in Suyo.

The model was used to compare current operating conditions of the Suyo system, 1.5 mg/L chlorine addition …

Collaborative Strategies For Sea Level Rise Adaptation In Hampton Roads, Virginia, Carol Considine, Emily Steinhilber

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

[Introduction] The Hampton Roads region is located in southeastern Virginia where the Chesapeake Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean. The region includes seventeen municipal governments and has a large federal government presence with 26 federal agencies represented (See Figure 1). The region has a population that exceeds 1.7 million and is home to the deepest water harbor on the U.S. East Coast. Hampton Roads' economy is dependent on the local waterways and houses the world's largest naval facility, the sixth largest containerized cargo complex and supports a thriving shipbuilding and repair industry as well as a tourism industry. However, the region's …