UB Engineering Students Assemble And Operate A Real Water-Treatment Plant For Final Project

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Even for experienced civil engineers, getting a pilot water-treatment plant up and running takes weeks of planning, skilled project management and close adherence to diagrams and instructions provided by the manufacturer.

That's what happened to four students pursuing master's degrees in the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Their mission was to assemble and test a pilot water-treatment plant at the Buffalo Water Treatment Plant for their final master's project. The final project is designed to test the ability of students to manage and implement a real-world project.

The students not only succeeded at their task and went on to graduate, one of them landed a job with American Anglian, the company that owned and manufactured the equipment and which operates the Buffalo water-treatment facility for the city.

"The students did not have the benefit of a parts inventory or process diagrams," said John VanBenschoten, Ph.D., UB associate professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering who was the students' supervisor. "They faced only box after box of equipment. Their challenge was to first understand the theory of the treatment process, and then to translate that theory into practice by assembling and running the treatment plant."

This was no ordinary pilot plant for processing drinking water; it was a dissolved air flotation (DAF) plant, an alternative to the conventional sedimentation tanks that are the most widely used in the U.S. and that currently process drinking water for Buffalo and Erie County. DAF plants are quite common in Europe.

Whereas sedimentation works by allowing particles in water to setttle to the bottom of a tank where they are removed, DAF works by floating them to the top. That simple difference is an advantage for particles, such as algae, that are difficult to remove by sedimentation. In areas where algae is a problem, as can be the case with Lake Erie water, DAF can process more water faster in the same-sized tank.

According to Steven Waldvogel, one of the master's students who is now assistant project manager with American Anglian's Buffalo office, the project was an invaluable experience.

"It taught me what a great need there is for proper planning ahead of time, and for proper monitoring and measurement of performance, both in the technology itself and in the people working on the project," he said.

Some aspects proved to be fairly easy to figure out.

"We all had a general concept of how the technology worked," said Waldvogel. "It was easy to see where the tanks should be in the treatment train. But the plumbing and some of the valves and meters that regulate and monitor the flows were much more confusing, and so was the filtration system at the end of the treatment."

In the end, the students found that perhaps the most valuable lesson they learned was just how much work -- and time -- it took to get a project off the ground.

"We greatly underestimated what it would take to finish the project," Waldvogel said. "Professor VanBenschoten had estimated that it would take us six to eight weeks. We didn't think too much about it until six to eight weeks had passed and we realized we weren't even near finishing!"

Assembly of the plant took three months; start-up, calibration, adjustment and testing took another month.

Once the plant was running, the students found that it consistently produced treated water of better quality than that required by Environmental Protection Agency regulations. Their final report, which compares the pilot plant to the Buffalo water-treatment facility, is being submitted to American Anglian.