More Water at NC State!

It looks like the Biological and Agricultural Engineering programs here at State have some good water resources work going on. Some of the material connects to my Advanced Energy work, since they're looking at water conservation, rain barrels, etc, as well as the large scale water runoff issues.

Water Quality Group
Biological and Agricultural Engineering

Biotechnology Meets Environmental Engineering

Here's a link to some of the research going on at NC State...

and detail about some of the equipment they use for image capture and analysis...

Liquid Assets II

Youngin and I watched Liquid Assets on DVD tonight.

It is very interesting and educational. It gives a nice overview of how water systems work, as well as a lot of specific stories about the challenges that everyone faces, from small towns to large cities.

A couple tidbits:
- New York City's water supply, for the most part, is gravity fed from distant lakes through two huge tunnels.
- Las Vegas actually claims they are using less water despite rapid population increases in recent years.
- Lots of camera technology is being used to inspect pipes. Atlanta has video of thousands and thousands of feet of pipe. They can use it to compare current conditions to past conditions, etc.

Check out the Trailer.

Particle Inspection - First Pass

My friend Ken has been working on some interesting software lately. You can see some images below that this software analyzes. The particles you see are tiny, as in one millionth of a meter. They are suspended in a water sample, which is flowing past a camera.

Fig. 1

This first image is an example of a background image. These are particles already in the camera's field of view before a new water sample is presented.

Fig. 2

In this image we see particles that are suspended in the water sample that we have put in front of the camera. Notice the squiggly particle (middle, left) that was also present in the background image. Now comes the cool part...

Fig. 3

When we run the Particle Inspection software on this image, the particles outlined in yellow are analyzed. Notice that the squiggly and the other background images are left out of the analysis, since they are not part of the current sample.

I'll talk more later about the analysis the software does, how the samples are presented to the camera, and how this technology is useful in the water resources world.

*Disclaimer: This project is still developing, and I am giving an explanation as a novice. Ken, feel free to comment with any corrections or clarifications.

State of the CE Department

I found the source for the "State of the NCSU CE Department" reports:

Reports

These are really interesting as they give a great overview of enrollment, graduation, etc!

AND, here are my current classes and professors

Hydraulics - Dr Ducoste
Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering - Dr Knappe
Civil Engineering Systems - Dr Baugh
Linear Algebra - Dr Hong

Liquid Assets

Here's the trailer to a documentary I would like to see.

Liquid Assets

The DVD

Starters

Since I am interested in the Water Resources segment of the Civil Engineering field, I have been doing a bit of reading about it online. I'll post interesting articles here. I would like to track interesting developments and better understand the field so this blog will allow anyone interested to follow along. I'm not expecting much of an audience, but I feel this blog will help me keep a list of references, etc, for my own use as well.

A quick google search finds the following water resources blogs:
American Water Resources Association
NY State (Cornell)
University of California