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Physicochemical Processes and

Organic Compounds in Aquatic Systems

12-725

Spring


Instructor:	Dr. Greg Lowry	Teaching Assistant:	TBA
E-mail:	glowry@cmu.edu	E-mail:	TBA
Office:	PH 123L	Office:	TBA
Office Hours:	TBA	Office Hours:	TBA

Primary Audience: M.S. and Ph.D. students in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Chemical Engineering.

Secondary Audience: Graduate students in other Engineering Disciplines, advanced undergraduates in Chemical or Civil and Environmental Engineering upon approval of the instructor.

Course Objectives:

To understand the factors governing the behavior of hazardous organic chemicals in the environment: distribution among air, water, and soil; surface water transport and subsurface transport; transformations.
To understand how a chemical's properties and equilibrium and rate principles affect the distribution of pollutants in the environment.
Become familiar with chemical property estimation methods.
To derive and use equilibrium and kinetic models for determining the ultimate fate of organic pollutants in the environment.

Prerequisites: 12-655 Water Quality Engineering or equivalent, or by consent of instructor

Grading: 25% Homework, 25% Midterm, 15% Laboratory, 35% Final Exam

Major Topics: (Note: Not all topics are addressed each semester)

Physical and Chemical Properties of Organic Pollutants

BOD Loading and Oxygen Demand

Degradable waste in streams
Streeter-Phelps and oxygen sag

Equilibrium Partitioning and Equilibrium Partitioning Models

Air-Water partitioning-hydrophobicity, solubility, Henry's Constant
Water-Solid and Biota-Water Partitioning-K_ow, BCF

Chemical Fate in Municipal Waste Treatment

Contaminant removal processes; sorption, volatilization, biodegradation

Interphase Mass Transfer

Gas-liquid mass transfer
Controlling resistance

Mixing and Dispersion

Transport equation
problem solving for step and pulse inputs

Contaminant Reactions and Oxygen Demand

Contaminant degradability and persistance
First-order decay processes
Biological transformations

Groundwater Flow and Subsurface Contaminant Transport

Darcy's law
permeability and hydraulic conductivity
1-D transport with sorbing contaminants
Retardation and effects of clean-up strategies

Reactor Theroy

CSTR vs. PFR
Response to steady and pulse inputs

Homework
All sets will be available via BlackBoard as Microsoft Word documents as the course progresses. An Equation Editor may be required.

PH 123L

Office:

TBA