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Water Environment & Technology (WE&T) is the premier magazine for the water quality field. WE&T provides information on what professionals demand:
cutting-edge technologies, innovative solutions, operations and maintenance, regulatory and legislative impacts, and professional development. |
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June 2007, Vol. 19, No. 6 |
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Research Notes
Seed of Change
University of Idaho (UI; Moscow) students from the colleges of Agricultural and Life Sciences and Engineering zeroed in on the tiny moringa seed as one component of an innovative solution to address clean water and water availability in Africa, according to a UI news release. The teams — with students in the campus research lab and in the field in Nairobi, Kenya — are refining a process to create clean, safe drinking water and catchment systems for the nomadic Maasai tribes.
For the student teams, the culture of Africa’s Maasai, which is resistant to outside influences, makes problem-solving for the tribal population a challenge, according to UI.
“The idea we had at the University of Idaho is how to use local materials to remove hazards in water so that the water is safe for drinking,” said Don Elger, professor of mechanical engineering and one of the project advisers. “The moringa seed is tiny, abundant, and works beautifully to filter harmful impurities from collected water.”
The student teams are divided into two projects: Clearwater-Aid, focused on creating biofilters, led by Tom Hess, professor of biological and agricultural engineering; and H2Oasis, focused on developing storage or reservoir systems for clean water, led by Elger.
In February Elger and five UI students took a 2-week trip to Nairobi and tested more than a year’s worth of research and design focused on water filtration and storage.
“The prototypes we are testing aim to reduce turbidity, or muddiness, in water and also remove harmful biological materials that can cause illness,” Elger said. Clearwater-Aid students turned to nature to address the problem.
H2Oasis team members constructed a catchment pond for storage to maintain a water source for the Maasai during the dry season to provide vegetation and water sources for tribal cattle, the UI press release notes.
Read more about the projects in the students’ online journals at clearwater-aid.editme.com and h2oasis.editme.com.
Physicists Reveal Water’s ‘Secrets’
Equipped with high-speed computers and the laws of physics, scientists from the University of Delaware (UD; Newark) and Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands) have developed a new method to “flush out” the hidden properties of water without the need for painstaking laboratory experiments, according to a UD press release.
Among its many applications, the research should help scientists better understand water not only in its liquid form but in other states as well, including highly reactive “supercritical” water, which is used to remove pollutants in wastewater and recover waste plastic in chemical recycling, said UD physics and astronomy professor Krzysztof Szalewicz.
Szalewicz led the scientific team, which included Robert Bukowski, a former UD post-doctoral researcher who is now at Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.), and Gerrit Groenenboom and Ad van der Avoird from the Institute for Molecules and Materials at Radboud University. The UD research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
“For a long time, most researchers agreed that, in its liquid state, each water molecule coordinates on average with four other water molecules by forming hydrogen bonds,” Szalewicz said. “However, a 2004 paper in Science claimed that this coordination takes place with only two molecules, a discovery that, if correct, would turn over the whole water paradigm.”
The experimental claim was not dismissed right away, Szalewicz said, because existing theoretical models of liquid water were coordinated to a specific class of experiments.
Through the use of quantum mechanics, the application of the laws of physics at the microscopic level, the scientists were able to generate a new theoretical framework for describing the structure and behavior of the water molecule atom by atom.
“This became possible recently when fast multiprocessor computers enabled very accurate solutions of the equations of quantum mechanics describing the forces that water molecules exert on each other,” Szalewicz said. “Once these forces are known, one can find motions in an ensemble of water molecules and predict all the properties of liquid water.”
The UD researchers used clusters of Linux computers to perform the large-scale computer calculations required for the research. The study took several months to complete. The result is a new model — the first that can accurately predict the properties of both a pair of water molecules and liquid water.
Contact Szalewicz at szalewic@udel.edu. The research is reported in “Predictions of the Properties of Water From First Principles” in the March 2 issue of Science.
Stanford Professor Wins Stockholm Water Prize
Professor Perry L. McCarty of Stanford University (Palo Alto, Calif.), a pioneer in the development of the understanding of biological and chemical processes for the safe supply and treatment of water, was named the 2007 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate.
McCarty’s work has led to more efficient biological treatment processes, in particular anaerobic treatment systems for municipal and industrial wastewaters, biological nutrient removal, and the development and use of biofilm reactors, according to a press release from the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI; Stockholm, Sweden).
An environmental engineer, McCarty has combined his knowledge in physical, chemical, biological, and microbiological processes and transferred the results into a technical development widely used all over the world as the basis for design and operation of wastewater treatment systems, according to SIWI. His other important contribution is the identity of mechanisms for biodegradation and the fate of hazardous and anthropogenic trace chemicals, as well as appropriate engineering for water quality improvement of groundwater, surface water, and soils.
McCarty has published more than 300 papers in water science, environmental engineering, and microbiology science journals, with 50 papers in the last 10 years, SIWI notes. He is an honorary member of the Water Environment Federation (Alexandria, Va.), a member of the National Academy of Engineering (Washington, D.C.), and an honorary member of the American Water Works Association (Denver).
The Stockholm Water Prize is a global award founded in 1990 and presented annually by the Stockholm Water Foundation to an individual, organization, or institution for outstanding water-related activities. The activities can be within fields such as education and awareness-raising, human and international relations, research, water management, and water-related aid.
For more information, see www.siwi.org.
New Web Site Helps Manage Dairy Nitrogen
A free, interactive Web site is now available to help dairy producers manage nitrogen on their farms more effectively. It’s the result of cooperative work by scientists from the U.S. Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.), and the University of Vermont (Burlington), funded by a U.S. Department of Agriculture Fund for Rural America grant.
Though nitrogen is an essential nutrient for crop and animal production, feeding too much of it in livestock rations or applying an excess as fertilizer or manure to crops can increase its runoff into surface and groundwater or its loss into the air, according to an ARS news release. And since commercial feeds and fertilizers are significant — and expensive — sources of nitrogen, maximizing nitrogen use efficiency is important to dairy producers and the public.
Soil scientist Jack Meisinger, with the ARS Environmental Management and By-Product Utilization Laboratory in Beltsville, Md., helped develop the Web site “Nitrogen Management on Dairy Farms,” which is accessible at www.dairyn.cornell.edu. There, users will find 58 linked pages of multimedia content covering management of crops and soils, feed storage, dairy herd nutrition, and manure use, according to an ARS news release.
The Web site is part tutorial, ARS states, with interactive diagrams to aid in the review of information, as well as quizzes. Instruction is provided on sampling and testing manure, soil, and crops for nitrogen. Information is also available on interpreting test results and calculating the amount of plant-available nitrogen present in a manure sample. A downloadable spreadsheet called the “Manure Nutrient Calculator” is provided as an example of a manure-crediting system used in New York.
State and federal research on managing the fate and transport of nitrogen in animal manure is used to formulate best management practices, the news release states. Case studies on the Web site illustrate how farms have made changes to reduce nutrient imbalances and losses by taking a whole-farm approach to nutrient management.
Read more about this research in the March 2007 issue of Agricultural Research magazine at www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/mar07/dairy0307.htm. Contact Meisinger at jmeising@anri.barc.usda.gov.
©2007 Water Environment Federation. All rights reserved.
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