University Environmental Engineering seniors won first place last week for a senior project entered in the 2013 Louisiana Transportation Conference hosted by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development.
The DOTD conference engineering competition showcased different student engineering projects, which were judged on everything from project presentation to actual results.
The LSU seniors’ project competed against Louisiana Tech University and University of Louisiana-Lafayette, winning the $1,000 prize that will go toward competing in a national competition in New Mexico this spring.
Dwayne Belello, Jeremy Beasley, Lucian Hill and Benjamin Pfeifer made up the team that presented the project to the conference. Team members Robyn Jones and Julian Moore did not present at the conference but contributed research on the design project.
The project is entitled “Hydrocarbon Fouling of Reverse Osmosis Membranes.”
“The goal of this is to pretty much clean the [waste] water, but as a byproduct, we’re taking the waste product and creating energy from it. That’s making it a more sustainable approach to treating [waste] water,” Hill said.
Hydrocarbons are commonly found in sources such as crude oil and produce energy when burned.
“We were given the task to remove hydrocarbons from industrial waste water … in an economic, efficient and sustainable manner. The emphasis there is the sustainable approach,” Beasley said.
According to Beasley, removing hydrocarbons from waste water is a practice long in existence, but the group’s goal was to “think outside of the box to find a sustainable alternative.”
Beasley said the group looked to several research methods to decide upon a good resource and chose to use rice hulls as the organic material.
Biological and agricultural engineering associate professor Chandra Theegala informed the students on burning the protective covering on grains of rice, called rice hulls, to create rice ash. The carbonized rice ash is then used to absorb hydrocarbons from the waste water.
“The pitch is you buy [rice] cheap from local farmers, because there are millions and millions of tons that are available for cheap — you use it in industry and burn it,” Hill said.
Once the rice ash absorbs the hydrocarbons through several processes, it is then burned as a primary energy form to conduct plant processes, Hill said. This allows plants to become self-sustainable at a cheap rate.
The team has proved that the design is viable on paper through tests and research, but the task is to now build a prototype, Hill said.
“We actually have to design a physical system to treat the industrial waste water that they’re going to give us at the competition,” Beasley said.
The competition will test how well the project removes the hydrocarbons through a technical report, oral presentation and physical results, Beasley said.
The team will present the final project at New Mexico State University at the Environmental Design Contest in April, he said.
