Sustainable Municipal Drinking Water Treatment CEE 4540

1. Sustainable Municipal Drinking Water TreatmentCEE 4540 Introduction School of Civil and Environmental Engineering 1 Monroe L. Weber-Shirk

2. Agenda… • Foreign Language Across the Curriculum • Latin American Studies Program • What is this course about? • Why am I teaching this course? • Introductions • It is a short walk to the edge of knowledge • A search for truth that matters • Groupthink: avoiding the truth • Myth in engineering • The Challenge • Course Organization

3. FLAC—Foreign Language Across the Curriculum • We need a bilingual TA for this 1 credit, once per week, 1 hr • This course, attached to CEE 4540 will be conducted in Spanish for almost any level of learner. • It is a conversation course or, as we say in Spanish, a “tertulia” about the subject you learn about with your professor in lecture. • The class is based on short texts/films/photos in Spanish that you will discuss with your classmates facilitated by your T.A. • There is no official written work required.   • This FLAC course was given last year and was a huge.

4. What is this course about? • One of my goals in this course is to encourage creative thinking about solutions to the enormous challenge of providing everyone on the planet with safe drinking water. • We will challenge the myth that this task can be accomplished by applying existing technologies and we will identify major technology gaps and learn new and better solutions. • My thesis is that engineers are needed to challenge existing assumptions and to create and document new sustainable solutions.

5. What is this course about? • I have the goal of helping you develop a fundamental understanding of the processes that control the performance of each of the drinking water treatment steps, • for a VERY specific problem; the production of safe drinking water from surface waters that are contaminated with sediment and microbes.

6. Course prerequisites • CEE 3310 or equivalent Fluid Mechanics course • CEE 3310 can be taken at the same time if you are willing to work harder in CEE 4540 and use your fluids text as a reference • CEE 4540 is where you can learn the theory behind the AguaClara technologies

7. Course Organization • CEE 4540 wiki : home to everything • https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/cee4540 • Class time logistics • i>clicker polls (required and available at bookstores) • Video recording synched with lecture notes • Design Challenges (teams) – except for tutorial! • Discussion board using Piazza • 2 Exams (individuals… sorry!) • Software skills • Mathcad 15 (ACCEL has licenses and download for $30) • AutoCAD (useful)

8. Why am I teaching this course? • Experience in refugee camps in Honduras in 1982-83 • The spark of interest: What makes slow sand filters work? • The discovery that no one knew • Invitation to begin a water project in Latin America (12/2002) • The realization that what I had been taught wasn’t up to the challenge of solving the big global challenge of providing safe drinking water

9. Mesa Grande: Waiting for water

10. Water in Colomoncagua

14. Introductions: Name that Student • Think about efficiency (multitasking) • Write your first name on the blackboard while you are waiting • Point to your name on the board • Describe VERY briefly something you did this summer that involved water using third person (Monroe went sailing this summer) • Ask the class, “What is my name?”

15. Why did you come to Cornell? • “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.” • — André Gide (1869–1951)

16. nanotechnology Water purification pharmaceuticals Uneven Knowledge Space WMD Learn from adjacent knowledge spaces!

17. Causes of Uneven Knowledge Expansion • Funding agency (top down science) • Target a few areas for growth • Soccer game syndrome • National Pride/Security Agenda • Dams • WMD • NASA • Private Enterprise • The historic preference for high tech inefficiency rather than robust, sustainable technology • Private enterprise creates solutions that require proprietary components (pharmaceuticals)

18. The Challenges of Creating New Knowledge • In many areas of engineering you only have to investigate a little to find the knowledge boundary • Flocculation • Porous Media Filtration optimization • Flow control for chlorinators • Efficacy of various coagulants • New knowledge (especially when at odds with tradition) takes years and even decades to be adopted when economies of competitive mass production aren’t at work

19. You should be taking a course in business or information technology • Environmental Engineering is a dead profession • The science behind environmental engineering is already well understood • Environmental engineers have been applying the same solutions for the past 100 years • Providing everyone on the planet with safe drinking water only requires the money and political will to apply known technologies Discussion time! Do you agree?

20. A Search for Truth that Matters AguaClara is creating new technologies, improving old technologies, and developing the design algorithms so that others can build surface water treatment plants of any size Math – Physics – Fluid Mechanics – Chemistry The amazing ability to represent reality symbolically

21. Groupthink • Groupthink refers to faulty decision-making in a group (coined by Irving Janis, 1972) • Groups experiencing groupthink do not consider all alternatives and they desire unanimity at the expense of quality decisions • Irving, Janis. (1972). Victims of groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Irving, Janis. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascos. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

22. Results of Groupthink • Examining few alternatives • Not being critical of each other's ideas • Not examining early alternatives • Not seeking expert opinion • Being highly selective in gathering information • Not having contingency plans True, true, true! Why would a group adopt these behaviors?

23. Some Symptoms of Groupthink • Having an illusion of invulnerability • Rationalizing poor decisions • Believing in the group's morality • Sharing stereotypes which guide the decision • Exercising direct pressure on others • Not expressing your true feelings • Maintaining an illusion of unanimity • Using mindguards to protect the group from negative information These are the people who filter the information coming to the group. They make sure that outside information is suppressed or reinterpreted if it fails to support the cherished assumptions of the group. As a result of this process, the group makes its decision only upon information that is supportive of that decision. This builds up a self-fulfilling cycle of correctness. The illusion of rightness and unanimity is preserved; no disruptive questioning or information is admitted by the group. peer review

24. Some Solutions to Groupthink • Admit that you don’t know everything! • Encourage honesty! • Question everything • Check with outside experts • Hold a "second-chance meeting" to offer one last opportunity to choose another course of action

25. Welcoming Dissent • Hi guys, August, 2008It occurred to me that before we build the 1.2 m deep AguaClara plant we should all stop for a few minutes and check to see if there is anything that bothers us about this bold new step. Remember the first lectures of CEE 454 when I talked about group think? Group think is when we all work to avoid encountering uncomfortable truths. We keep the party line going and suppress new information that could have caused us to reconsider our plans. Group think is sometimes cited as the cause of the Challenger tragedy.So now is the time to make sure we welcome dissenting views. If any of you have seen anything or have any gut feelings about sedimentation tanks or flocculators that makes you think that our design for 1.2 m deep tanks is risky or prone to failure, we want to hear it!You can see a draft CAD design at https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/AGUACLARA/Cuatro+Comunidades. (you will need the free viewing software).

26. Groupthink? Who me? • The Emperors new clothes, WMD in Iraq, Space shuttle Columbia • How might Environmental Engineers fall into the trap of groupthink? • I have my favorite technology. I don’t want to discover that it is obsolete and that the years of effort that I put into improving that technology have been a waste • We all know this technology is responsible for saving us from disease. What do you mean, “Where is the proof?” Compare the incidence of waterborne disease in the US with that of the developing world. • How are you encouraged to “groupthink” by your Cornell Education? • What can we do to reduce “groupthink” in this course? Unwilling to explore alternatives Don’t confuse respect for leaders/experts and groupthink Respect AND question!

27. Engineers are susceptible to groupthink • The data isn’t always easy to interpret • We are forced to make decisions with insufficient data • We deal with complex systems that can’t easily be modeled • We quote each other’s hypotheses so often that we begin to accept them as theory • The peer reviewed engineering literature contains many, many errors and the peer reviewers can act like Mind Guards

28. Role of Myth in Environmental Engineering • Myth can be a useful way of understanding a complex reality • creation stories • Myth can also be used to describe generally accepted but unproven hypotheses (my usage here) • Myth #1: Science and engineering aren’t influenced by myth because they are based on the scientific method

29. Historic Examples of Myth • Malaria (bad air disease hypothesis) • Streams purify themselves in 1 mile • The air coming out of the ground under conditions of low or sinking groundwater causes typhoid

30. Environmental Engineering/Public Health Myths (or suspects!) • Dead bodies cause disease • Slow sand filters ripen because of biological growth in the filter bed • Chlorine disinfects dirty water • Chlorine eliminated typhoid fever from the US • Cessation of chlorination due to fear of Disinfection By Products caused the cholera outbreak in Peru in 1993 • We already know how to solve the environmental engineering problem of more than 1 billion people not having access to safe drinking water

31. The Creation of Myths in Peer Review Literature • Publish an article where you list hypotheses that might explain some scientific phenomenon • Quote that first article and fail to mention that it was an unproven hypothesis • Eventually literature reviews at the beginning of scientific papers in your field will refer to this hypothesis as if it were a theory • Voila!

32. Uncovering a “Theory” to Reveal a Myth or a Knowledge Gap • Does this “theory” provide insights that have led to new discoveries or new applications? • Does the “theory” include equations that are based on the fundamental laws of nature? • Does the “theory” use dimensionless constants that are close to one? • Is it an elegant “theory” with no need for special cases?

33. Expose the Myth • Let’s expose some more environmental engineering myths • Don’t believe everything I say • You should always be asking, “How do we know that?” • I am not immune from the impulse to create simple explanations • There are many things that I have taught in this class in previous years that I now know are wrong or incomplete understandings

34. The Challenge: Sustainable Municipal Drinking Water Supplies • We need the brightest and the best to create new and better solutions so we can meet the goal of providing everyone with safe drinking water • This challenge is apparently more difficult than building a space station, designing a fuel cell, or inventing the world wide web • So let’s role up our sleeves and begin…

35. It is a short walk… • …to the edge of knowledge • There are significant knowledge gaps in every process that I will be teaching in this course • We aren’t able to optimize surface water treatment processes because we don’t yet understand the fundamental physics of many of the processes • We are getting closer…

36. AguaClara Network Investigation, innovation, education, and design Cornell U AguaClara R&D Supervision, quality assurance, consulting services, and technical assistance for the implementation partners. AguaClara LLC Design/Build/Operate/Train/Transfer Provide ongoing technical assistance for Water Boards Implementation Partners Water boards Own, operate, maintain their water system. Monitor and upload performance data. Community Members Conserve water, drink safe water, and pay the tariff

37. Sharing Insights, Feedback: an Ongoing Innovation System Cornell U AguaClara R&D AguaClara LLC Implementation Partners Water Boards Community Members

38. AguaClara at Cornell Research, Design, & Admin Graduate Research Fundamental physical chemical processes for enhanced drinking water treatment Capstone Design Course CEE 4540: Sustainable Municipal Drinking Water Treatment Project Based Courses AguaClara: Sustainable Water Supply Project* CEE 2550 CEE 4550 CEE 5051/5052 Summer Internships at Cornell Engineering in Context CEE 4560 2 week trip to Honduras during January intersession Service & Learning Learning & Service