Sixth International Conference on Water, Energy and Environment

Gold Sponsor

Bee’ah

Knowledge Partner

Griffin Consultants

Keynote I

Innovation & Environment Impact: How Sharjah is leading the Landscape for Change

Mr. Khalid Al Huraimel Group Chief Executive Officer of Bee’ah, UAE

Khaled Al Huraimel is the Group Chief Executive Officer of Bee’ah, and has served in this capacity since August 2009. Under his leadership, Bee’ah has transformed from a waste management company, to a sustainability pioneer who is setting new benchmarks for quality of life across the MENA region.

Khaled has been the driving force behind Bee’ah’s vision for the future, facilitating the achievement of several remarkable milestones, such as building the first waste-to-energy plant in the Middle East through the Emirates Waste to Energy Company, a joint venture with Masdar. He has established ION, the first sustainable transport company in the UAE; and founded Evoteq to lead digital transformation through the creation of disruptive, technological platforms.

Taking the helm when Bee’ah was in the preliminary stages of pursuing a zero-waste ambition, Khaled enforced this ambition and took it even further. He implemented state-of-the-art solutions and a unique approach to a circular economy, supporting Bee’ah to establish the UAE’s first fully integrated waste management complex, and achieve the highest waste diversion rates in the Middle East. From improving the quality of natural resources like air and water, to executing awareness initiatives for communities, Bee’ah took a holistic approach to environmental management under Khaled’s stewardship.

Khaled has led the diversification of Bee’ah’s portfolio, investing in ventures ranging from renewable energy, to healthcare, mobility, and technology, to execute an all-encompassing master plan to raise living standards across the region. Championing the Middle East’s move towards green architectural solutions, Khaled is also overseeing the establishment of Bee’ah’s new headquarters. Designed by Zaha Hadid, the sustainable, net-zero energy building is slated be the smartest office in the region.

Prior to joining Bee’ah, Khaled held leadership roles at ENOC, Nakheel and Arabian Global Investments, using innovative insights to achieve remarkable results. He has also founded several successful startups.

Khaled graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Marketing, from King Fahd University, and an MBA from the University of Bradford. He also graduated from the Harvard Business School’s prestigious Senior Executive Leadership Program and the Dubai Leaders Programme at the Wharton Business School.

Keynote II

The Sustainability of Providing Water, Energy, and Food

Heriberto Cabezas US Environmental Protection Agency National Risk Management Research Laboratory Cincinnati, Ohio, USA & Pazmany Peter Catholic University Center for Process Systems Engineering and Sustainability Budapest, Hungary

The World is steadily moving into a major challenge. The challenge is how to provide for the growing and developing human population within the limits of one planet, the Earth, over the long term. The effort is known as sustainability. To explore this challenge, I will focus on the three closely linked issues of providing water, energy, and food. In addition, there is the issue of maintaining order and stability as necessary conditions for any kind of acceptable human existence. These issues, unfortunately, present critical but not well-bounded problems, and for that reason there are many more questions than answers. However, to explore the issues and their bounds, I will discuss what is known including some planetary limits and limits imposed by the known laws of Nature. This will include consideration of what exactly constitutes a sustainable system for water, energy, and food.  While many considerations are possible, these can be condensed to about six requirements roughly representing human well-being, burden on land, energy resource use, efficiency of energy use, economic value productivity, and system stability.  The application of these requirements to real systems will be discussed.  The lecture will conclude with some thoughts on approaches stand a chance of adoption under current and foreseeable future conditions.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this presentation are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

BIOGRAPHY:

Heriberto Cabezas serves as Senior Science Advisor to the Land and Material Management Division in the U.S. EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), and as Professor at the Institute for Process Systems Engineering and Sustainability at the Pazmany Peter Catholic University  in Budapest, Hungary.  He is Chair of the Engineers Forum on Sustainability, a workgroup of all of the major professional engineering societies.  His awards include: 1998 U.S. EPA Science Achievement Award in Engineering, 2007 Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, 2011 Research Excellence Award in Sustainable Engineering from the AIChE, ORD Sustainability Award (team) from the U.S. EPA, 2013 Lawrence K. Cecil Award in Environmental Chemical Engineering from the AIChE.  Dr. Cabezas holds a Ph.D. from the University of Florida in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a M.S. from the University of Florida, and a B.S. (magna cum laude) from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, all in chemical engineering.  He served as Embassy Science Fellow at the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb, Croatia in 2014. His publications include over ninety peer-reviewed articles and chapters, two edited books, and major software.  He is a Fellow of the AIChE, a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Board Certified Member of the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists. Dr. Cabezas’ current research interests focus on: (1) the design of sustainable chemical processes and supply chains, (2) the design of sustainable productions systems in the nexus of food-energy-water, and (3) global sustainability where he leads the international Workgroup on Global Sustainability from his appointment at the Pazmany Peter Catholic University.

Keynote III

The emerging application of 3D printing in desalination and water treatment processes

Dr. Hassan Arafat Director, Center for Membrane and Advanced Water Technology

Additive manufacturing, also known as three-dimensional (3D) printing, is a state of the art technology that has been gaining momentum in several applications including aerospace, automotive industry and the medical field. Recently, 3D printing has also gained attention as a promising fabrication pathway for key components of membrane-based systems for desalination and water treatment. Such system components that can potentially be fabricated via 3D printing range from large module parts, such as the anti-telescoping caps of reverse osmosis vessels, to the membranes themselves. Despite the promise 3D printing brings to this field, thanks to its agility in printing complex shapes, it still has several challenges to be overcome. Scalability, cost, build size, speed, resolution and the mechanical integrity of printed shapes are among the key challenges for this technology. Nonetheless, tangible advances were made in recent years in making a particular system component via 3D printing: the feed channel spacer. A handful of research groups around the world have made it their mission to print feed spacers with very interesting architectures and properties for a range of water treatment processes. For example, our group at Khalifa University in the UAE has successfully developed and tested 3D printed feed spacers with complex geometries based on triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) mathematical architectures. TPMS are surfaces that can be described mathematically such that they have no self-intersecting or enfolded surfaces. “Triply periodic” means that the structure can be patterned in the 3D space and “minimal surface” means that it locally minimizes surface area for a given boundary such that the mean curvature at each point on the surface is zero. The complex and intertwined minimal surface divides the space into two or more entangled convoluted domains, such that each domain is a single connected and infinite component. In nature, minimal surfaces topologies usually exist as interfaces separating two sub-volumes, as can be observed in soap films, cell membranes and butterfly wings, among others. These shapes have unique topological properties that proved them very beneficial as feed spacer designs in water systems, as was proven through several studies which we conducted over the past 3 years. The use of TPMS spacers not only resulted in enhanced mass transfer through the membranes, it also led to significantly curtailed fouling and pressure drop in the feed channels. This was shown for a wide range of water treatment systems, including reverse osmosis, ultrafiltration and membrane distillation.

BIOGRAPHY:

Prof. Arafat is the director of the Center for Membrane and Advanced Water Technology and professor of chemical engineering at Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, UAE. His current research expertise is in membrane-based desalination, with focus on third-generation desalination technologies such as membrane distillation (MD) and the development of novel membranes thereof. He initiated a new research trend on sustainable desalination, which integrates multiple multidisciplinary tools to enhance the prospects of deploying desalination, with the aim of achieving national water and food security. The concepts behind this trend are captured in his book: Desalination Sustainability: A Technical, Socioeconomic and Environmental Approach. Prof. Arafat received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Univ. of Cincinnati (Ohio, USA) in 2000 and a BSc in Chem. Eng. From the Univ. of Jordan. From 2000 to 2003, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory (Illinois, USA) as a postdoc then as a research scientist, developing processes for nuclear waste treatment at the United States Department of Energy (DOE) sites. Between 2003 and 2010, he was a faculty member of the Chem. Eng. Dept. at An-Najah University (Palestinian Territory). Between 2009 and 2012, he served as an adjunct associate professor of the Biological Eng. Dept. at Utah State Univ. (Utah, USA) and in 2010, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts, USA) as a visiting professor. He is a recipient of four research fellowships by the US National Academy of Science (USA), the Open Society Foundation (USA) and DAAD (Germany). Through his career thus far, he supervised more than 30 postdoctoral fellows and graduate students and received 23 research grants, exceeding $13 Million in funding. His research was published in 230 book chapters, journal papers and conference presentations, in addition to two US patents and 50+ keynote and invited talks worldwide. Among other honors, Prof. Arafat received the Khalifa Award for Education, presented by the President of UAE, the Mohammad Bin Rashid Medal for Scientific Excellence, presented by the Prime Minister of UAE, the United States Department of Energy Secretarial Honor Award, the Mondialogo Engineering Award by Daimler AG and UNESCO, and the Univ. of Cincinnati Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship.

Keynote IV

Computer Aided Methods/Tools for Sustainable Chemical Process and Product Design

Dr. Mario Eden Department Chair and Joe T. & Billie Carole McMillan Professor

Process and product design problems by nature are open ended and may yield many solutions that are attractive and near optimal. It is incumbent upon the process systems engineering community to help bridge the gap between fundamental science and engineering applications as new research areas continue to emerge. This presentation will highlight several novel methods/tools for chemical process/product design, specifically: 1) Group contribution based synthesis of process flowsheets and 2) Chemical product simulator software for mixture/blend design.

A systematic group contribution based framework has been developed for synthesis of process flowsheets from a given set of input and output specifications. Analogous to the group contribution methods developed for molecular design, the framework employs process groups to represent different unit operations in the system. Feasible flowsheet configurations are generated through a computer-aided tool (ProCAFD) using efficient combinatorial algorithms and the performance of each candidate flowsheet is evaluated using a set of flowsheet properties. The design variables for the selected flowsheet(s) are identified through a reverse simulation approach and are used as initial estimates for rigorous simulation to verify the feasibility and performance of the design.

Mixture design is a Design of Experiments (DOE) tool used to determine the optimum combination of chemical constituents that deliver a desired response (or property) using a minimum number of experimental runs. While the approach is sufficient for most experimental designs, it suffers from combinatorial explosion when dealing with the multi-component mixtures found in e.g. pharmaceutical excipients and polymer blends. Use of computer-aided mixture/blend design (CAMbD) methods is finding increasing use because of their potential to quickly generate and evaluate thousands of candidate mixtures/blends of chemicals; to estimate a large number of the needed physico-chemical properties of chemicals and their mixtures, and to select a small number of feasible product candidates for further verification by experiments. This is a challenging task requiring data acquisition, data testing, model development, model-based design method development, etc., that needs to be integrated within a computer-aided framework. A systematic computer-aided framework has been developed and implemented in a product design software tool (ProCAPD). It contains a suite of databases of chemicals and properties, a library of property models, numerical routines to solve mathematical/optimization problems as well as various property based product performance calculation procedures.

BIOGRAPHY:

Dr. Mario Eden is the Department Chair and Joe T. & Billie Carole McMillan Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Auburn University. His main areas of expertise include process design, integration and optimization, as well as molecular synthesis and product design. His group focuses on the development of systematic methodologies for process and product synthesis, design, integration, and optimization.

Dr. Eden’s research has generated 3 edited books, 141 refereed papers/book chapters and resulted in almost 400 presentations at national/international meetings, including 65 invited lectures and seminars. To support his research and educational activities, Dr. Eden has successfully secured almost $21.0M in extramural funding from federal industrial sponsors. 

Dr. Eden is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2006), the Auburn Engineering Alumni Council Junior Faculty Research Award (2006), the William F. Walker Superior Teaching Award (2007), the Fred H. Pumphrey Teaching Award for Excellence (2009 and 2011), the SGA Award for Outstanding Faculty Member in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering (2009 and 2011), the Outstanding Faculty Member in the Department of Chemical Engineering (2009, 2011, 2013, and 2014), the Auburn Engineering Alumni Council Senior Faculty Research Award (2012), and the William F. Walker Merit Teaching Award (2014). As one of the founding members of Auburn University’s Center for Bioenergy and Bioproducts, Dr. Eden and his collaborators received the AU President’s Outstanding Collaborative Units Award (2012). At the 2009 Foundations of Computer Aided Process Design (FOCAPD), he was honored with the Best Faculty Contribution Award. Dr. Eden was selected to participate in the 2010 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium. He was awarded the 2014 AIChE Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) Division Outstanding Young Researcher Award and is the recipient of the 2015-2016 Auburn University Creative Research and Scholarship Award (the highest recognition for research at Auburn University).

Dr. Eden received his M.Sc. (1999) and Ph.D. (2003) degrees from the Technical University of Denmark, both in Chemical Engineering. He has been an active member of the process systems engineering community for almost 20 years. Dr. Eden was elected 2nd Vice-Chair and has previously served as a Director of the Computing and Systems Technology Division of AIChE (2013-2017) and is currently a Trustee of Computer Aids for Chemical Engineering (CACHE) Corporation. Dr. Eden was selected to co-chair the 2014 Foundations of Computer Aided Process Design (FOCAPD) conference and also co-chaired the 2018 Process Systems Engineering conference (PSE 2018). He serves on the editorial boards for Computers & Chemical Engineering, Process Integration & Optimization for Sustainability, Clean Technologies & Environmental Policy, Chemical Process & Product Modeling, and the Journal of Engineering. He is a co-founder of the PSE for SPEED (Sustainable Product Process Engineering, Evaluation and Design) company.

Keynote V

Development of Advanced Functional Membrane Technologies for Enhanced and Selective Separation in Water and Wastewater Treatment

Dr. Renbi Bai Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering

Polymeric membrane separation technology has increasingly, as well as widely, been used in various separation applications, especially in water and wastewater purification, now. The technology can provide many advantages such as a simpler system, with higher separation efficiency and, possibly, lower cost and lower energy consumption, etc. However, the technology still faces a number of major challenges for its more widespread and more effective applications. These challenges include: (1) Severe membrane fouling: Conventional polymeric membranes, for example, cannot be directly used for oil/water separation applications, due to the severe and rapid fouling of the membranes by oils and thus low water productivity and high operational cost. (2) Simple function and lack of selectivity: Most membrane separation is simply based on the size-exclusion mechanism. It may remove both harmful as well as beneficial components from water, without the capability to differentiate them. (3) Heavily experimental one and lack of predictivity: Membrane development and the selection of membranes for separation applications are still largely, or even completely, dependent on many repeated and often tedious experiments without any predictive capability: With so many types of membranes and diversified separation targets or conditions, there is a lack of predictivity that may guide new membrane development, proper membrane selection or the prediction of membrane separation performance.

In this presentation, I will address some of the progress in the above-mentioned challenge areas. Fundamental theoretical analysis is shown to be useful in new membrane development, and membrane fouling analysis. Multifunctional membranes are demonstrated to be an effective method to achieve selective separation, reduce energy consumption and possibly realize resource recovery as well as for risk warning, etc. A focus will also be put on a novel polymeric membrane prepared to have both super-hydrophilic and super-oleophobic surface properties through the approach of using a novel triblock copolymer as the additive. The membrane was tested for direct oil/water separation of artificial samples prepared from hexadecane, crude oil and palm oil as well as real samples collected from produced water in oil field, palm oil plant’s effluent, and lubrication oil emulsions from mechanical cutting factory, etc. in a wide range of oil concentration from a few hundreds to a few hundred thousand milligrams per liter in the feed. The experimental results indicate that, while the conventional polymeric membranes may be fouled within seconds, the novel polymeric membrane exhibited excellent performances, with high water flux and low flux decay, high or complete flux recovery by a simple physical cleaning (e.g., water flushing or backwashing) after a filtration run, while can achieve the oil removal efficiency at as high as 75 to above 99%, depending on the type and state of oil in the water medium. The developed novel polymeric membrane showed strong anti-fouling performance, even for the most difficult compound of oils, and hence have a great potential to be used as an effective method for oily wastewater treatment and oil recovery for many industries in the future.

BIOGRAPHY:

Dr. Bai is a professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS). He received his PhD degree from the University of Dundee, UK in 1994. He worked as the Technical Manager for the Asia Pacific Region with the Baker Process company, USA, for a few years and then joined NUS in 1999. One of his main research areas has been in the novel membranes and membrane technologies for special separation applications. He has published more than 80 papers in various leading international journals, with more than 5600 SCI citations (more than 8000 citations in Google Scholar). He has been granted more than 10 international invention patents, including the USA and European ones, most of them in the areas of novel membranes and composite photocatalysts. He has been serving as an editorial board member for various international journals, including Separation and Purification Technology. He has been invited to author the chapter of “Stimuli Responsive Membranes” in the ‘Encyclopedia of Membrane Science and Technology’ (published by John Wiley in 2013) and the chapter of “Materials Used in Membranes for Water Purification and Recycling” in the book of ‘Materials for a Sustainable Future’ (published by RSC, London, in 2012). He has also been invited to deliver a number of Plenary and Keynote lectures in major international conferences, including the World Particle Separation Congress (IWA, Toulouse 2007), etc. 

The contest is open to graduate and undergraduate students. All student posters must be submitted during the call for papers and must be accepted for the students’ poster session to be entered into the contest.

Posters for the contest will be displayed and winners will be announced at the general poster session on March 28, 2019. prizes will be given to first, second and third-place prize winners at the conference banquate.

Poster abstractc/extended abstracts must be submitted by November 15, 2018.

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