Removal of polar organic micropollutants by pilot-scale reverse osmosis drinking water treatment

The robustness of reverse osmosis (RO) against polar organic micropollutants (MPs) was investigated in pilot-scale drinking water treatment. Experiments were carried in hypoxic conditions to treat a raw anaerobic riverbank filtrate spiked with a mixture of thirty model compounds. The chemicals were selected from scientific literature data based on their relevance for the quality of freshwater systems, RO permeate and drinking water. MPs passage and the influence of permeate flux were evaluated with a typical low-pressure RO membrane and quantified by liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry. A strong inverse correlation between size and passage of neutral hydrophilic compounds was observed. This correlation was weaker for moderately hydrophobic MPs. Anionic MPs displayed nearly no passage due to electrostatic repulsion with the negatively charged membrane surface, whereas breakthrough of small cationic MPs could be observed. The passage figures observed for the investigated set of MPs ranged from less than 1%-25%. Statistical analysis was performed to evaluate the relationship between physicochemical properties and passage. The effects of permeate flux were more pronounced for small neutral MPs, which displayed a higher passage after a pressure drop

Assessing Safety on Dutch Freeways with Data from Infrastructure-Based Intelligent Transportation Systems

Most freeway traffic surveillance technologies deployed around the world remain infrastructure based, with underground loop detectors being the most common among them. A proactive application for traffic surveillance data recently explored for some freeways in the United States is the estimation of real-time crash risk. The application involves establishing relationships between historical crashes and archived traffic data collected before those crashes. In these studies, crash occurrence on freeway sections has been related to temporal-spatial variation in speed and high lane occupancy. Critical modeling questions that remain unanswered relate to transferability of such an approach. This study attempts to address the issues of such transfer through analysis of crash data and corresponding loop detector data from five freeways in the Utrecht region of the Netherlands. Traffic surveillance systems for these freeways include more detectors per kilometer than most U.S. freeways. Their real-time data are also already being used for applications of advanced intelligent transportation systems. The analysis procedure proposed here accounts for these distinctions. In addition to these transferability issues, application is introduced of a new data-mining methodology, Random Forests, for identifying variables significantly associated with the binary target variable (crash versus noncrash). It was found that the average and standard deviations of speed and volume are related to real-time crash likelihood. Subjecting these significantly related variables to multilayer perceptron and normal radial basis function neural networks resulted in classifiers that achieved classification accuracy of approximately 61% for crashes and 79% for noncrashes. The promising classification accuracy indicates that these models can be used for reliable assessment of real-time crash risk on Dutch freeways as well

Environmental Software Systems. Data Science in Action : 13th IFIP WG 5.11 International Symposium, ISESS 2020, Wageningen, The Netherlands, February 5–7, 2020, Proceedings

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th IFIP WG 5.11 International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems, ISESS 2020, held in Wageningen, The Netherlands, in February 2020. The 22 full papers and 3 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics on environmental informatics, including data mining, artificial intelligence, high performance and cloud computing, visualization and smart sensing for environmental, earth, agricultural and food applications

Potential impacts of changing supply-water quality on drinking water distribution: A review

Driven by the development of water purification technologies and water quality regulations, the use of better source water and/or upgraded water treatment processes to improve drinking water quality have become common practices worldwide. However, even though these elements lead to improved water quality, the water quality may be impacted during its distribution through piped networks due to the processes such as pipe material release, biofilm formation and detachment, accumulation and resuspension of loose deposits. Irregular changes in supply-water quality may cause physiochemical and microbiological de-stabilization of pipe material, biofilms and loose deposits in the distribution system that have been established over decades and may harbor components that cause health or esthetical issues (brown water). Even though it is clearly relevant to customers’ health (e.g., recent Flint water crisis), until now, switching of supply-water quality is done without any systematic evaluation. This article reviews the contaminants that develop in the water distribution system and their characteristics, as well as the possible transition effects during the switching of treated water quality by destabilization and the release of pipe material and contaminants into the water and the subsequent risks. At the end of this article, a framework is proposed for the evaluation of potential transition effects

Defining and Classifying Infrastructural Contestation: Towards a Synergy Between Anthropology and Data Science

The last decade infrastructure systems have been under strain around the globe. The 2008 financial crisis, the so-called fourth industrial revolution, ongoing urbanisation and climate change have contributed to the emergence of an infrastructural crisis that has been labelled as infrastructural gap. During this period, infrastructure systems have increasingly become sites of public contestation with significant effects on their operation and governance. At stake has been the issues of access to infrastructure, their social and environmental consequences and the ‘modern ideal’ embodied in the design of those socio-technical systems. With this paper we apply a cross-disciplinary methodology in order to document and define the practices of this new wave of infrastructural contestation, taking Greece in the 2008–2017 period as the case study. The synthesis of quantitative and qualitative datasets with ethnographic knowledge help us, furthermore, to record tendencies and patterns in the ongoing phenomenon of infrastructural contestation (This study is part of infra-demos project (www.infrademos.net), which is funded by a VIDI grant awarded by the Dutch Organisation of Science, PI: Prof. Dimitris Dalakoglou, Dept. of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)