AWWA Water Science Author Spotlight

Abstract

Having published an article in AWWA Water Science, Amir Alansari answered questions from the publication's editor-in-chief, Kenneth L. Mercer, about the research. Critical Elements of Flocculation in Drinking Water Treatment Amir Alansari and James Amburgey I'm a water treatment specialist at Stantec at their office in Winston-Salem, N.C. My research focus is primarily on coagulation chemistry and process optimization. Lately I've been working on developing new digital tools for predicting optimal coagulation conditions using artificial intelligence. It was a $5,000 stipend to participate in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program over the summer at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I was in the civil and environmental engineering program and stumbled into the world of water treatment by chance. Amir won first place in the ACE19 student poster contest. Dr. Amburgey had the biggest influence on my career and on everything I have accomplished so far. I completed all three civil engineering degrees (bachelor's, master's, doctorate) working with him at the same university. In total, I spent 12 years under his mentorship, during which time I was able to freely follow my curiosity and work on whatever I wanted. The best advice I got from him was to use the time I had in graduate school to grow my skill sets as a researcher and an engineer as much as possible. My coauthor and I read a paper that was published in 1992 in Journal AWWA by Han and Lawler, where they mathematically showed that mechanical mixing played an insignificant role in the flocculation process. We recognized the implications of their work on the recommended design guidelines for flocculation; however, an extensive literature review did not yield any conclusive evidence that supported or challenged their theory. Our article presents results from a series of experiments we performed to measure the effects of various flocculation parameters (e.g., mixing duration) on settled and filtered water-turbidity removal efficiency and determine whether Han and Lawler were correct. I try my best to have a positive impact on the lives of people around me. I'd like to think that my work is contributing to the body of knowledge, even if it is a tiny contribution. Many of our current design guidelines are based on work done about four to six decades ago. There have been a lot of scientific and technological advancements since then. I believe water treatment design could benefit from a 21st-century overhaul, which would require a renewed research interest and collective effort from the research community, regulators, consulting engineers, and industry. The current funding model does not favor this type of research. It considers topics such as coagulation as matured topics, with nothing left to discover. Our research highlighted the benefits of optimizing coagulation conditions (via jar tests) using filtered turbidity as the performance metric instead of settled water turbidity. We found that jar-test mixing conditions had a significant effect on settled turbidity removals. This means that operators no longer have to “calibrate” their jar test procedures to get their results to match the full-scale process. It simplifies the optimization process by reducing the number of variables to just two—coagulant dose and coagulation pH—which ultimately means they can achieve better treatment performance while minimizing chemical usage. To learn more about Amir's research, visit his AWWA Water Science article, available online at https://doi.org/10.1002/aws2.1213.