CUE 2007 Home >> Academic Programs >> Capstone Design Students Use Skills to Assist Communities in Mexico and Colorado

CUE 2007
Environmental Engineering Program:
Capstone Design Students Use Skills to Assist Communities in Mexico and Colorado

The group working to improve wastewater treatment for Pesqueira, Mexico, includes: (bottom photo, back row, left to right) University of Sonora Professor Dagoberto Burgos, Carolina Romero of SEDESOL, University of Sonora Professor Jose Luis Garcia, University of Sonora student exchange coordinator Marisol Delgado Torres, CU students Kate Beggs, Scott Weirich, Marc Mayotte, and Mohammed Said; (center) CU Professor Angela Bielefeldt, and (front row) CU students Tricia Quigley, Pablo Cornejo, Lindsay Holden, and Carolyn Hackbarth.

Students taking the senior-level Environmental Engineering Design course this year are helping communities in Sonora, Mexico, as well as Colorado's San Luis Valley and eastern plains, to find solutions to environmental problems. Projects include redesigning a wastewater treatment system to eliminate contamination, assisting a goat dairy in reducing or eliminating its waste stream, and creating a process to treat and use the byproducts of bio-diesel production.

"It is a rewarding feeling knowing that we are directly contributing to help address a very real problem…and hopefully provide a practical solution that (the community) can use," says environmental and chemical engineering student Ryan Davis.

The course is the required capstone design experience in the environmental engineering curriculum and also has some enrollment of civil engineering undergraduate and graduate students interested in water, environment, and service learning.

"I think that it has increased my ability to identify and solve real-world problems that are much more poorly defined than typical examples given in classes, and it has led me to consider the importance of the non-technical aspects of a project as much as the technical side," says graduate student Scott Weirich.

The capstone design class has completed several service learning projects since 2001, but a grant from the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance is significantly expanding partnerships to include developing communities throughout the world. In 2005–06, the grant supported three students working with civil engineering Professor Bernard Amadei on engineering projects in Rwanda.

This year, the grant supported the travel of Professor Angela Bielefeldt, director of the Environmental Engineering Program since September 2006, and eight students to visit Pesqueira, Mexico, located in the state of Sonora. The CU-Boulder team met with the mayor and representatives of the Department of Social Development in Mexico (SEDESOL) and the community to discuss their wastewater treatment needs. Professors Jose Luis Garcia and Dagoberto Burgos from the University of Sonora were instrumental in making arrangements for the visit and serving as translators.

Twelve CU-Boulder students are now re-designing Pesqueira's wastewater treatment system, which currently consists of a small, unlined lagoon that releases contaminants into groundwater and surface water. With 9 percent annual population growth and about 16,000 migrant farm workers who crowd into the community during the grape harvest in late spring, the current system is far too small, Bielefeldt says. The team's recommended solution, which will be presented to the community this spring, will not only better handle population needs, but also enable the treated water to be used for agricultural irrigation—a big plus in this very arid region where the water supply is severely overstressed. It is hoped that SEDESOL will fund construction of the facility.

Other students are working on service learning projects in Colorado, facilitated by the International Center for Appropriate and Sustainable Technology. Five students are determining the best process to treat and use the glycerol slurry from a future community-scale bio-diesel production facility in the Holyoke area, while another group is helping a goat dairy in the San Luis Valley to develop a process that will produce as close to "zero waste" as possible. In both projects, it is important that the processes protect the environment while enabling the businesses to be profitable.

"With projections that the environmental engineering profession will experience significant growth over the next 10 years, we need to attract more students into environmental engineering," Bielefeldt says. "U.S. environmental expertise will be exported around the world, so it is important to get students to think about the unique challenges and priorities that different communities have. I hope that these real, hands-on projects will help our students gain confidence in their abilities to learn on their own and be inspired to service."

For more information visit: www.colorado.edu/engineering/EnvEng