Transform Municipal Wastewater Treatment Systems into Community Enteric Disease Information Networks
Dr. Tao Yan obtained a three year (2015-2018) project from the National Science Foundation (about $350,000) to significantly expand the role of municipal wastewater systems in public health protection and investigates the feasibility of using municipal wastewater systems as surveillance platforms for microbial infectious diseases in the communities. These systems play a critical role in the protection of the environment.
Enable Crowdsourcing in Microbial Water Quality Monitoring in Water Distribution Networks
NSF’s EAGER: PPER program also funded this one year (2017-2018) of Dr. Tao Yan (about $100,000). The spread of antibiotic resistance is a grand challenge to human health. This project aims to develop low-cost control strategies to curb the spread of antibiotic resistance from animal wastes and related agricultural practices. Water faucets are the last and probably the most important control point for managing microbial risks in drinking water. This project aims to develop a crowdsourcing strategy to achieve widespread drinking water quality monitoring by enabling citizen scientists to conduct water quality monitoring at homes.
Performance Analysis of Biofiltration Swales
The Kohala Center of the Hawaiian Scholars Doctoral Fellowship Program, The Deviants from the Norm Fund and Dr. Paul and Elizabeth Nakayama funded (about $45,000) this project of Dr. Albert Kim for one year (2017-2018) to understand the basic phenomenological processes of pollutant and stormwater transport within a biofiltration swale (BFS). The literature on BFS significantly lacks reliable prediction tools to analyze long-term performance under the influence of the current practice and maintenance. We use computational fluid dynamics modeling and simulations to answer some of the questions we pose. This research will help provide a design tool of BFS for applications in parkways, highways, and residential uses.
Vacuum Membrane Distillation Design for Deep Seawater Concentration
Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering funded (about $70,000) this project of Dr. Albert Kim for about 1.5 years (2016-2018) to (i) develop modern fundamental theory for hollow fiber vacuum membrane distillation, especially for concentrating the high salinity water, (ii) build a database of many simulation cases (of an order of 10 millions), and (iii) provide design methods to be combined with pre-existing energy-and-water related environmental and ocean engineering processes.
Cleaning Ball Dynamics in Heat Exchanger (HX) Surfaces: Dissipative Hydrodynamics Simulation
The Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering funded (about $90,000) this project of Dr. Albert Kim for about 1.5 years (2016-2018) to (i) develop modern fundamental theory for granular dissipative hydrodynamics (GDH) in aqueous systems, (ii) to apply GDH to investigate the cleaning of internally fouled heat exchange using cleaning balls, and (iii) to provide operating conditions of the cleaning process and optimal characteristics of cleaning ball structures.
