Have you ever wondered how river or lake water is treated and delivered to your tap? How is domestic wastewater treated and discharged to the environment? How is water recycled from wastewater to potable water? How is seawater desalinated? What are the principles behind these technologies?
Students in this course will learn the fundamentals of water and wastewater treatment unit operations including coagulation, sedimentation, disinfection, filtration, oxidation, membrane separation, and biological processes. The focus is on “engineering fundamentals”; therefore, we will use chemical principles and transfer process principles as well as mathematics to perform mass balances and design reactors and systems for the water quality control. The ultimate goal of this course is to help students develop the analytical thinking skills and engineering problem solving skills that are necessary to tackle ever-increasing water quality problems.
What can we do about water problems in regions of the world that lack such types of established infrastructure as those shown above? What do we need to know, as an engineer, to help these people in need of clean water?
The course aims at the practical application of environmental engineering fundamentals to solve real-world environmental and human health problems in underdeveloped regions of the world and at providing students with international, hands-on learning experience. The class will exercise various problem-based practices to define and solve problems related to water and wastewater treatment, water and air quality monitoring and control, subsurface remediation, and hygienic infrastructure such as latrine. Students will design and build small scale systems, install and operate these systems in the field, monitor and analyze the performance, and perform engineering simulations. Students will prepare a final report and deliver a final technical presentation as class deliverables.