Overview

To view overview information, please select an offering from the drop-down menu above.

Academic contacts

To view unit coordinator information, please select an offering from the drop-down menu above.

Offerings

MURDOCH-S1-INT-2018-ONGOING

To view more information about assessments, contacts and learning activities specific to one of these offerings, please select an offering from the drop-down menu above.

Enrolment rules

Enrolment in graduate coursework in a Murdoch Environmental, Chemical or Metallurgical Engineering discipline. Other Murdoch graduate students with equivalent qualifications may be enrolled with permission from the unit coordinator.

Other learning activities

To view other learning activity information, please select an offering from the drop-down menu above.

Learning activities

To view learning activity information, please select an offering from the drop-down menu above.

Learning outcomes

1.
Understand the processes by which water quality regulations are determined and implemented.
2.
Understand the various means by which acceptable levels of impurity in water for various purposes are determined and how water treatment plants must determine compliance with these quality standards.
3.
Understand the nature and basis for social and cultural perceptions of water quality issues and gain an awareness of the methods used by professional water engineers to ensure projects are compatible with the consumers’ social and cultural mores.
4.
Understand and be able to access the resources to quantify the costs of water treatment equipment and ancillary processes.
5.
Be able to utilize and calculate the present worth of water treatment equipment and processes based on historical information. Understand and be able to utilize the tools for amortizing the present and future cost of water projects including use of various payment periods and cost escalation mechanisms.

Assessments

To view assessment information, please select an offering from the drop-down menu above.

Additional information

Unit content:The unit will cover the following topics: · Administrative processes for establishing regulations and the scientific underpinnings for norms governing the quality of potable water, wastewater discharges, representative industrial process waters, and horticulture and livestock use water. · Various means to regulate water quality including numeric, incentive, maximum total load, and beneficial use methods. · The concept of integrated water management (IWM) and the various roles water treatment many play in IWM. · Ethics and social justice with respect to water access and water quality including the effect of external factors (e.g., global climate change, food security, non-point source pollution) on water quality and technology decisions. · Whole process and fractional capital equipment methods for water treatment system costing and the use and limitations of cost indexes in bringing forward system costs. · The engineering economics tools for calculation of present, annual and future worth of single point and recurring costs including temporally escalating costs and costs occurring with differing frequencies. · Economic alternatives analyses · The sources for and reading of water quality regulations and specifications, including common nomenclature and enforcement strictures. · Practical determination of water quality compliance from data gathered as a function of time and location. · Supply and demand balances including incorporation of uncertainty in projections. · Stakeholder identification and characterization with respect to water use and regulation. · Collection, critical evaluation, and use of historical equipment and process costs to estimate current costs including at capacity adjustments. · Development of spreadsheet tools for calculation and comparison of equivalency between various time series of expenditures and incomes. Choice between water treatment alternatives based on engineering economics and externalities.