Events Video Library

Klamath Dam Removal
Join us to hear from Mark Bransom, Chief Executive Officer of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, about the cooperative effort to re-establish the natural vitality of the Klamath River so that it can support all communities in the Klamath basin. Mark will detail the journey KRRC has been on to decommission four dams along the Klamath River to restore river health, provide favorable economic, environmental, and societal impacts, and address stakeholder concerns.

A 1997 graduate of Oregon State University with a doctoral degree in civil and environmental engineering, Mark has over 25 years of planning, engineering, and construction experience in water resources and environmental management for state and local governments, federal agencies, Tribal Nations, NGOs, and private sector clients throughout the United States.

Revealing nature's secrets: A chemical forensics approach to decode the information stored in water

When thinking about water quality, many people probably think about individual pesticides or antibiotics that they heard about in the news. The truth is, there are hundreds, likely millions, of chemicals present in most surface water samples. These chemicals might seem like a random assortment of molecules, but they are a chemical record, or a receipt, of all the biological, chemical, and physical processes that are occurring within a system. When people disturb the land, it leaves a chemical signature in the water. When salmon spawn in the rivers, it leaves a chemical signature in the water. Whether processes occur on land or in the water, our surface waters are libraries of chemical information. If we can decode the chemical signatures in a water sample, we can theoretically collect data on anything and everything that occurs upstream. The challenge is decoding the chemical signatures present. This work has implications for understanding human and ecosystem health and provides a glimpse into how nature will respond to climate change.

"Efficient wastewater recycling for agriculture: A sustainable approach using hybrid electrodialysis and forward osmosis

With increasing water shortages, many agricultural producers are looking to reclaimed water for irrigation.

Xue Jin, assistant professor in the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering, will discuss a study that explores the feasibility of a new process called electrodialysis-forward osmosis. The goal of the research was to recover nutrients and clean water from anaerobic digester effluent and to safely use it to help grow food crops, specifically lettuce and kale, through hydroponic production.

Impressively, the treatment achieved high nutrient recovery rates and reclaimed up to 74% of clean water. Additionally, the hybrid ED-FO process captured 76-98% of heavy metals and 83% of total organic carbon in the residual waste stream.

Both ED and FO demonstrated low-fouling potential. The economic analysis indicated that the hybrid ED-FO process is promising for scalable implementation, making it highly attractive in terms of resource recovery, waste footprint reduction, and water quality enhancement."

Groundwater Resilience and Agriculture Competitiveness in Oregon Through Climate-Adaptive Multibeneficial Managed Aquifer Recharge

The presentation will discuss Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) as a crucial tool for managing water resources in the face of climate change. It highlights drywells as a promising solution to overcome challenges associated with traditional MAR techniques. Drywells offer efficient groundwater recharge over a large area, bypassing surface obstacles and minimizing water loss. They present a cost-effective and sustainable approach to address water scarcity and enhance water resilience in diverse environments.

From brine to mineral: Extracting minerals and clean water from brines using a thermal cycle and machine learning-based design

Lithium extraction is a vital piece in the shift toward global electrification. Yet traditional methods are slow, resource-heavy, and yield low results. Our innovative approach uses an advanced evaporation process to concentrate lithium ions from high-salinity brines efficiently, reducing lithium loss and preventing fouling. We've made significant enhancements to industrial brine concentration methods, incorporating cutting-edge technology in multiphase flow and transport phenomena.

A key element is our machine learning-based system design and control. It uses an artificial intelligence “digital twin” in the humidification-dehumidification (HDH) cycle, which captures data patterns and understands the system's sensitivity to various parameters. This model optimizes throughput with minimal trial and error, making design parameter changes and maximizing performance cost-effectively.

How do people respond to visualization of uncertainty when involved in conservation planning for climate-resilient watersheds?

Conservation practices often involve using nature-based solutions on watershed landscapes to solve complex water management problems. These problems can include things like determining how to share water, keeping water clean, dealing with floods and droughts, and adapting to the changing climate.

Practices such as wetlands, grassy areas next to streams, and riparian buffers are implemented on different areas of the landscape and can help make our water cleaner by reducing the transport of nutrients, pesticides, and pathogens from flowing into rivers and lakes downstream. These practices also simultaneously create homes for wildlife and can help lessen the impact of floods and droughts in an area.

But planning for these conservation practices isn't simple. There are many unknowns to consider, like the natural environment, nearby buildings and roads, and how people behave. When engineers or technologists work on solutions for conservation, they need to make sure stakeholders understand the uncertainties involved.

However, many people who are affected by these conservation decisions might not fully understand or might ignore the information about uncertainties. Therefore, it's important to show these uncertainties in a way that's easy for everyone to understand. This helps make sure that decisions about conservation are made in timely and effective ways.

This presentation provides insight into how creating visualizations of the uncertainties around these efforts can impact how people in watershed communities make decisions regarding actions aimed at reducing flooding.

2023 Oregon State Engineering Faculty Lecture and Q&A: "Resilience and Sustainability in Power Systems and  Power Electronics"
 

2023 Oregon State Engineering Faculty Lecture and Q&A: "The Bayesian Statistical Approach to Inverse Problems" 
 

2023 Oregon Sate Engineering Faculty Lecture and Q&A: "Reverse Innovation to Protect Health and Climate Advances in Cleaner Biomass Combustion"

2023 Oregon State Engineering Faculty Lecture and Q&A: " Pushing Particles - The Enduring Correlation between Monte Carlo Neutron Transport and High-Performance Computing"