Speaker
Sean McBeath, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract
In 2021, the EPA reported over 21,000 communities in significant non-compliance with the ‘Safe Drinking Water Act’, highlighting a social and public health injustice in the United States. These problems persist beyond the US and are ubiquitous throughout the world and intensify in resource limited communities. Potable water inequity is in part due to the infeasibility of implementing conventional treatment technologies, due to a lack of economy-of-scale, the reliance on centralized process chemical manufacturing, and the required chemical and energy supply chain to facilitate treatment.
Electrified processes present a possible alternative for resource-limited system applications, as they can eliminate the chemical and energy supply chain associated with conventional technologies. Electrochemical treatment process approaches like electro-oxidation, electrocoagulation, chemical electrosynthesis and electro-regenerative materials are robust circular solutions for decentralized applications. Moreover, the development of sensitive point-of-use electrochemical sensors can help to alleviate challenges associated with dependencies on centralized labs and expensive analytical instrumentation for potable water quality monitoring. Research related to both fundamental and applied aspect of these technologies will be explored, as well as their prospects in providing safe and sustainable water services to underserved populations.
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