Congratulations to Scott & Ryan for a successful defense

Scott Simpson and Ryan Shae successfully defended their MS theses as part of the Gordon Engineering Leadership program. Scott’s thesis -Modeling and Analysis of Forecast-Integrated Stormwater Discharge Control Systems - focused on developing automated control of stormwater infrastructure based on weather forecasts. The idea is that retention ponds release their stored water ahead of a storm to increase the storage volume and decrease runoff and damage to downstream infrastructure. Ryan’s project - Eliminating Unaccounted for Water in the Dedham-Westwood Water District - dealt with combating water loss in distribution systems. By isolating parts of a system and combining various sources of data, Ryan was able to get a better estimate of the losses and their likely cause.

Image from Scott Simpson thesis.

http://www.northeastern.edu/gordonleadership/

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CBAD: Community Biological Ammonium Demand

I am pleased to announce our recent publication in ES&T under the leadership of Wayne Gardner from the University of Texas. In this paper we present the concept of CBAD (community biological ammonium demand) to help understand CyanoHAB ecology. (C)BAD is similar to BOD (biochemical oxygen demand), a well-known and proven concept in environmental engineering and we hope BAD will be useful for advancing understanding and managing lakes plagued by CyanoHABs.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.est.6b06296

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