Asee peer logo

Integrating Engineering, Innovation, and Research at All Levels: An Educational Model for Water Reuse Design

Download Paper |

Conference

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Columbus, Ohio

Publication Date

June 24, 2017

Start Date

June 24, 2017

End Date

June 28, 2017

Conference Session

Environmental Engineering Division Technical Session 3

Tagged Division

Environmental Engineering

Page Count

14

DOI

10.18260/1-2--28553

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/28553

Download Count

479

Request a correction

Paper Authors

biography

Annalisa Onnis-Hayden Northeastern University

visit author page

Dr. Annalisa Onnis-Hayden is an Associate Teaching Professor in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. She received her MS and PhD in Environmental Engineering, at Northeastern University and University of Cagliari, Italy. She has over ten years’ teaching and research experience in Environmental Engineering. Her research activity mainly focus on biological nutrient removal (both Nitrogen and Phosphorus), removal of emerging contaminants in wastewater, microbial ecology in engineered systems, as well as treatment for water reuse and nutrient recovery. She is the coordinator of the BEST program, initiated to offer opportunities and attract undergraduate and multidisciplinary students to participate in research and/or learn new applications of molecular biotechnology for environmental engineering.

visit author page

biography

Carolina Beatriz Venegas-Martinez Northeastern University

visit author page

PhD in Environmental Engineering with 14 years of experience in the water & wastewater treatment field, including 5+ years of experience teaching courses related to water quality, water/wastewater treatment, and water resources/environmental management. Currently working as the Academic Operations Manager of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. Her research interests are on Environmental Health and Water Remediation, mainly on biological treatment for wastewater and water reuse.

visit author page

biography

Marissa P. Dreyer Northeastern University

visit author page

Graduate student in Bioengineering at Northeastern University.

visit author page

Download Paper |

Abstract

Growing urban populations, increasing water consumption, and decreasing predictability of climate all point to an ever-increasing need to improve water-use efficiency and watershed management around the world. Moreover, providing clean water and restoring the nitrogen cycle, are two of the 14 National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges, that future engineers will need to act upon. Therefore, treating once-used water on-site to safe effluent-reuse standards—rather than using the water just once and flushing it back to an expensive, high-maintenance centralized treatment plant—has the potential to help reverse this trend by restoring the local water-nutrient cycle. With these considerations, in the spring of 2016, a capstone project was designed to task students of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University to provide solutions to those Engineering Grand Challenges. The project involved the selection of an on-site wastewater reclamation and reuse technology, followed by the design, construction, operation, and testing of the selected technology. A tidal flow wetland was chosen and it was tested in the laboratory of civil infrastructure at Northeastern University. The objectives of this pilot system were twofold. First, as a research tool, for undergraduate and graduate students; this system can be used to build data to show the reliability of tidal flow treatment as a decentralized wastewater treatment approach for residential wastewater, as well as optimize constituent removal by assessing the impacts of adjusting various treatment parameters (recycle ratio, treatment cycles per day, constituent concentrations, etc.). Secondly, as an education tool: the system can be used to teach undergraduate students about alternative wastewater treatment, fluid dynamics and hydraulics, material properties, and even Arduino and C++ programming. Also, as literature suggests that the major obstacles in the widespread application of water reuse projects are the public perception and the institutional barriers, addressing the stigma of water reuse trough education was deemed to be vital, together with the pilot, to demonstrate the feasibility of water reuse technologies. Therefore, as part of this objective, the project included a public education component, which main outcome was the creation of a website (northeastern.edu/waternotwaste). The project was successfully completed during the spring of 2016, and handed to the Civil and Environmental Engineering department. The system has, since then, been used for the Young Scholar Program (YSP) over the summer of 2016 and is currently being used for an undergraduate research project funded by the Northeastern University Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors Award. The paper will discuss the implementation of this type of capstone projects and provide suggestions on how to integrate design projects, innovation, and research for undergraduate education which address the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges.

Onnis-Hayden , A., & Venegas-Martinez, C. B., & Dreyer, M. P. (2017, June), Integrating Engineering, Innovation, and Research at All Levels: An Educational Model for Water Reuse Design Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio. 10.18260/1-2--28553

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2017 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015