Date: Jan 21, 2014 Source: Company Data (
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Professor Phillip Barak is once again offering a capstone course for the Spring Semester, titled Nutritent Recovery from Wastewater.
In the first Nutrient Recovery from Wastewater capstone course, we focused on phosphorus recovery, inspired by a presentation from Menachem Tabanpour, president and co-founder of Nutrient Recovery & Upcycling, LLC — a spin-off company that he, Dr. Barak, and former student Dr. Mauricio Avila created — on a tour of wastewater treatment plants in Guatemala. Students were inspired to look at wastewater treatment as resource recovery rather than waste removal with an aspiring end goal of designing a wastewater treatment plant that would pay for itself through the sale of it's resources. Thus far, Dr. Barak has patented a phosphorus recovery process and anticipates a pilot demonstration of the process in 2015.
In this second Nutrient Recovery from Wastewater course, the focus is turned towards nitrogen recovery. Students will tour and collect samples from three diverse wastewater streams--the Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District Nine Springs Facility, the Dane County Manure Digester operated by Clear Horizons, and a cheese processing plant--to understand the nutrient removal processes currently in place and the factors that influenced their design. The course will challenge them to identify ways to transform the current designs into resource recovery, comparing the nutrient values and potential for ammonia recovery for each facility to the cost of recovery.
We anticipate that solutions will be developed by the student team for the various wastewater streams examined using the electrodialysis equipment in the Barak lab. With faculty direction, and lab support, they will have an opportunity to design experiments, to concentrate ammonium and reduce fouling, calculate efficiency from analytical results, and determine the feasibility of electrodialysis for ammonium recovery and ammonia production from wastewater streams. UW-Madison capstones require a public presentation of findings in one format or another, and we anticipate that in addition to the P3 Expo in Washington, D.C., the undergraduate team will showcase their work in a poster presentation at the CALS Research Symposium in April.
