  CU Researchers Work to Improve Quality of Drinking Water
All of us want to drink water that tastes, looks, and smells good — and we also need water that is safe from a chemical and microbial perspective. But that is a large demand to put on a community drinking water utility, especially a small one that has little control over the quality of water that it must treat. The newly forming Center for Drinking Water Optimization (CDWO) at CU-Boulder's College of Engineering is developing a methodology that will assist utilities in finding solutions to this challenge. Funded by a five-year cooperative agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the center is directed by Dr. Joy Barrett and Professor R. Scott Summers and has partnerships with the University of Cincinnati and local consultants, Process Applications, Inc. and Malcolm Pirnie, Inc. New national drinking water regulations that will become effective over the next seven years present another challenge because they will force more than half of the nation's utilities to make major changes to their treatment plants. "One of the unique aspects of CDWO is that we are developing an approach that will allow utilities to maximize the use of their existing facilities," said Barrett. "We assess a utility's performance potential to meet goals that go beyond the federal regulations. In many cases, optimization of a plant's design, administration, and operation makes it possible to achieve these goals without major capital improvements." Professor Summers and graduate research assistants Miguel Arias, Eric Dickenson, and Lori Work are researching the effective use of disinfectants, including the fate of chlorine and other disinfectants after they are applied. "Disinfectants are a double-edged sword," said Summers. "We need them to inactivate pathogenic microorganisms, but they are such strong oxidants that they react with background organic matter to form halogenated (chlorinated and brominated) compounds that are of health concern. So we have to apply them effectively." Little is known about the reactions of disinfectants with background organic matter, which is being removed through other treatment processes. Understanding these heterogeneous reactions will allow the point of application and dose of the disinfectant to be optimized. Assistant CDWO Director Gabriele Solarik is leading an effort to develop a water treatment plant model, which will help utilities assess the impact of plant modifications and help them determine which additional treatment processes they should consider. Site-specific raw water quality values and operational parameters are put into the model, which then predicts the performance of the system relative to the regulations in a multi-objective function space. The center is also working with the City of Boulder to implement a pilot plant at the Betasso Water Treatment Plant to study the impact of moving the point of disinfection on plant performance. CDWO is working with local utilities in Boulder, Aurora, Colorado Springs, Denver, and Fort Collins, as well as with Colorado State University, through the Front Range Drinking Water Consortium. The center also serves as a national resource by developing and demonstrating an optimization framework in partnership with government drinking water agencies on a state and regional basis; and by providing training for collaborators in the Partnership for Safe Water, a voluntary program in which utilities commit to providing the best water treatment possible. For more information on the center's activities, go to www.cdwo.org.  Engineering Home |
