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

摘要

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 fourteen 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 address these challenges by restoring the local water-nutrient cycle. With these considerations, during the spring of 2016 a capstone project at Northeastern University was designed to task civil and environmental engineering students 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, and operation of a pilot system to test the selected technology, as well as the creation of educational material including a website for educational and outreach purposes. The project was presented internally at the university-level and at a regional student design competition related to water, for which the students received first place, and had access to participate at the national level competition. The project was finally handed to the Civil and Environmental Engineering department, and it has been used for research both by high school students as part of the Young Scholar Program (YSP) over the summer of 2016 and by several undergraduate students since September 2016. This paper will discuss the implementation of this hands-on capstone project that along with providing students with a high-quality curriculum, research opportunities, and exposing them to real world problems, this project-oriented capstone initiative helped equip the next generation of engineers to make a valuable contribution and put them at the forefront of education, engineering, and innovation.