Environmental, Water Resources and Coastal Engineering - Faculty
- Sankar Arumugam
Hydroclimatology, water resources planning and management, stochastic hydrology
- Morton A. Barlaz
Rrefuse decomposition in landfills, integrated solid waste management and anaerobic bioremediation. In the area of refuse decomposition, Dr. Barlaz is studying the biodegradability of individual refuse constituents and hazardous organics in landfills, evaluating techniques for improving methane yields from landfills, and developing strategies for monitoring during and after the post-closure care period. Dr. Barlaz is also interested in methane emissions and oxidation in landfill covers. Dr. Barlaz is also involved in research to identify optimal strategies for solid waste management in consideration of both cost and environmental burdens using life-cycle analysis. This work is in collaboration with Drs. Brill and Ranjithan. Finally, Dr. Barlaz works with Dr. R. C. Borden on anaerobic decomposition in contaminated aquifers.
- Robert C. Borden
Soil and groundwater remediation. Development and application of innovative, low-cost methods for treatment of soil and groundwater contaminants including Monitored Natural Attenuation (MNA), anaerobic bioremediation using emulsified oils, in situ chemical oxidation, and treatment of acid mine drainage. Work includes laboratory experimentation, fieldwork and mathematical model development.
- E. Downey Brill Jr.
Environmental systems analysis, modeling, optimization.
- Joe DeCarolis
Energy and environment issues with the goal of promoting long term sustainability. He is particularly interested in the application of energy technologies to effect deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Dr. DeCarolis builds and applies energy systems models to study how a portfolio of technologies could be utilized over the next half century to develop a clean and affordable global energy system.
- Francis L. de los Reyes III
Interface of microbial ecology and environmental engineering. At this interface, molecular techniques are utilized as powerful tools for the analysis of microbial populations in engineered and natural treatment systems, allowing us to move away from the "black box" paradigm common in biological waste treatment. Environmental process engineering is approached from a fundamental standpoint- combining the insights from molecular approaches with innovative process experiments and modeling. This combined engineering/molecular/ecological approach is being used to assess issues in biological treatment such as: (1) growth, life strategies, and interactions of key microbial populations in treatment systems, (2) development of novel reactor designs and the coupling of reactor performance to microbial community structure, and (3) integration of results from molecular assays with treatment process modeling.
- Joel J. Ducoste
Advanced water/wastewater treatment modeling, computational fluid dynamics modeling, physico-chemical processes in water treatment, experimental fluid dynamics, solid/liquid separation processes, rapid mixing and flocculation design, chemical and UV disinfection, water treatment process scaleup, and water/wastewater process optimization.
- H. Christopher Frey
Air pollution prevention and control; modeling of the performance, emissions, and cost of process technologies; exposure assessment; and quantitative analysis of variability and uncertainty in energy and environmental systems.
- Mohammed (Mo) A. Gabr
Geoenvironmental Engineering, Geosynthetics, Waste Containment and Confinement, Physicochemical Phenomena of Soils.
- Detlef R. U. Knappe
Removal of emerging contaminants and organic micropollutants from drinking water, adsorption of organic micropollutants by activated carbon and alternative adsorbents, characterization of adsorbent materials, advanced oxidation processes, interactions between micropollutants and humic substances, bioavailability, coagulation, mitigating the effects of algae on drinking water quality and treatment process performance.
- G. (Kumar) Mahinthakumar
Computational modeling of subsurface flow and reactive transport processes, high performance computing, computational fluid dynamics, inverse problems, finite element methods, sparse matrix solvers, genetic algorithms, and biomedical computing applications.
- Margery F. Overton
Coastal hydrodynamics, dune erosion, hazard identification and mitigation in coastal environments
- S. Ranji Ranjithan
Mathematical modeling and optimization, evolutionary computation, systems analysis, computer-based decision support tools, decision making under uncertainty, artificial neural networks; areas of applications include air quality management, watershed management, animal waste management, solid waste management, and transportation engineering.
- Jie Yu
Water wave mechanics, coastal hydrodynamics and processes, environmental fluid mechanics.
Emeritus Faculty
- Allan C. Chao
Unit operations and processes of water and waste treatment.
- John S. Fisher
Coastal engineering and sediment transport.
Adjunct Faculty
- Richard A. Luettich, Jr. (Institute of Marine Sciences, UNC-CH)
- Donald R. van der Vaart (NC DENR)
- Jay Cheng (BAE, NCSU)
©Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
