The team of Amal Ghamrawi, Ruoshi (Rose) Zhao, Tania Farah and (not pictured) David Tran, walked away with top honours at the Water Environment Association of Ontario (WEAO) Student Design Competition held recently in Toronto

Winning water project emphasizes affordable resource recovery

A team of fourth year Environmental Engineering students walked away with top honours at the Water Environment Association of Ontario (WEAO) Student Design Competition held recently in Toronto, for a cost-saving wastewater design solution that allows efficient resource recovery.

The team of Amal Ghamrawi, Ruoshi (Rose) Zhao, Tania Farah and David Tran, all fourth year students, developed their project in response to a call for ideas that would allow Ashbridges Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant (ABTP), the country’s largest, to lessen environmental impact, reduce the cost of water treatment or adopt a resource recovery approach.

“Our solutions allows efficient phosphorus and nitrogen recovery, an important process to recover resources - a feature the judges highly appreciated,” says Ghamrawi.

“Though the permitted investment limit of the contest was $80 to $200 million, we proposed an efficient capital investment of approximately $50 million.”

Municipal wastewater treatment plants treat the water that we use in our homes and businesses, including what we flush down our toilets, before releasing it back to our lakes and rivers.  

The team started their intensive research in September under the supervision of Environmental Engineering professor Rajesh Seth and competed against five other universities at the Toronto event.

“In all the last seven competitions that we have participated, the most rewarding part has been the judges’ praise for UWindsor teams’ level and quality of work,” says Seth.

The UWindsor team will head to Chicago in September to compete against other North American teams at the Water Environment Federation’s Annual Technical Exhibition and Conference.

The team of Amal Ghamrawi, Ruoshi (Rose) Zhao, Tania Farah and David Tran, walk away with top honours at the Water Environment Association of Ontario (WEAO) Student Design Competition held recently in Toronto.