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Environmental Engineering

24 January 2024

Environmental engineering at UC is about applying engineering principles and experience to solve problems of environmental quality. Environmental engineers design and set up systems to provide clean drinking water and adequately treat wastewater, solid wastes, hazardous wastes, and air pollutants. Learn more.

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Environmental engineers the environmental impacts of pollutants and ways to reduce these, both at source, and with treatment. Increasingly, environmental engineers explore sustainable systems and work with professionals across a wide range of disciplines including sociology, ecology, geology and management science.

Environmental engineers need knowledge in physics, mathematics, chemistry and microbiology, with good communications skills and an interest in providing practical solutions in environmental quality. Environmental engineers work as professional consulting engineers, in local government and industry and in research and development.

We also interact closely with staff from Chemical and Process Engineering, Natural Resources Engineering, Geography and Facilities Management.

Study environmental process engineering

Find out more about environmental engineering at UC

Interests in the environmental engineering group include:

  • Wastewater treatment
  • Solid waste
  • Contaminant transport

Recent and current research projects include:

  • Use of naturally-occurring volatile fatty acids for pesticide removal during the denitrification process
  • Groundwater extraction and disposal modelling for coal-seam gas recovery
  • Odour production from kerbside collected domestic kitchen organics
  • Physical and mathematical modelling of the composting process
  • Use of white-rot fungi in pentacholorophenol (PCP) remediation
  • Slow sand filters for rural drinking water treatment

Our well-equipped modern laboratory occupies a floor area of 235 m2 and contains all the basic environmental chemistry analytical facilities, plus two temperature controlled rooms, and a number of laboratory-scale wastewater treatment reactors.

Major equipment items include:

  • Total organic carbon analyser, with autosampler
  • Ion analyser, with heater block and autosampler
  • Gas chromatograph, with autosampler
  • Respirometric BOD apparatus
  • COD reactor (semi-micro)
  • Dissolved Oxygen meters
  • Jar test apparatus
  • Stainless steel reactor vessels (7; capacity 30  L each)

The following staff members are involved in Environmental Engineering.

Technicians:

  • Aude Thierry
  • Fabio Cabral Silveira

Find out more about our research

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