The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is pleased to announce Dr. Mark Benjamin of the University of Washington as speaker for the 2009 AEESP Distinguished Lecture.

Micro-granular adsorptive membrane filtration: A whole new world of treatment technologies?
Thursday October 29th, 1:00 pm
Engineering Lab room 303

Abstract:

Membranes are the “wave of the present” in water purification, whether the focus is removal of pathogens, desalination, trace contaminant removal, or separation of secondary effluent from biosolids in wastewater treatment. In all of these applications, membrane fouling is the dominant impediment to wider and/or more efficient use of the technology. Often, the source of the fouling is dissolved and colloidal organic matter. We have investigated various ways to use adsorption to address this problem and reached the surprising conclusion that the approach used to dose the adsorbent can have a very large effect on the amount of fouling reduction achieved. The results caused us to shift our focus from protection of the membranes to the dynamics of pollutant interactions with a thin (~100 mm) layer of immobilized particles and to ask the much broader question: Can membranes serve as essentially inert supports for miniaturized packed-bed treatment processes that have been shrunk from the scale of meters to <1 mm? This talk describes the trajectory of that research and explores theoretical and practical issues related to the large-scale application of such micro-sized packed beds.

Dr. Mark Benjamin is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington, where he has been on the faculty for 31 years.  He received a B.S in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University and M.S. and PhD degrees Chemical and Civil Engineering, respectively, from Stanford University. Dr. Benjamin’s research interests include: physical-chemical treatment processes, natural organic matter chemistry and behavior in water treatment systems, adsorption and ion exchange, membrane-based technologies for water and wastewater treatment, removal of metals from water, and formation of chlorinated disinfection by-products. He has written a widely used textbook on Water Chemistry and is finalizing another on Physical/Chemical Water Treatment Processes (with Desmond Lawler of UT Austin). He and his students have won several awards for their research papers and dissertations.