RI ASCE March Dinner Meeting
Thursday, 20 March 2025, 5:30pm
Featured Speaker:
Joseph E. Goodwill, PhD, PE, LEED-AP
Carroll D. & Charles M. Billmyer Professor in Engineering
Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Rhode Island
Topic:
MOVING BEYOND RESILIENCE BY CONSIDERING ANTIFRAGILITY IN POTABLE WATER SYSTEMS
It is inherently difficult to plan water systems for a future that is non-predictive. This presentation introduces a novel perspective for the design and operation of potable water systems under increasing water quality volatility (e.g., a relatively rapid and unpredicted deviation from baseline water quality). Increased water quality volatility and deep uncertainty stress water systems, confound design decisions, and increase the risk of decreased water system performance. Recent emphasis on resilience in drinking water treatment has partly addressed this issue, but still establishes an adversarial relationship with change. An antifragile system benefits from volatile change. By incorporating antifragility, water systems may move beyond resilience and improve performance with extreme events and other changes, rather than survive, or fail and quickly recover. Using examples of algal blooms, wildfires, and the COVID-19 pandemic, this presentation illustrates fragility, resilience, and antifragility within physicochemical process design including clarification, adsorption, and disinfection. Methods for increasing antifragility, both individual process options and new system design tools, will be discussed. Novel physicochemical processes with antifragile characteristics include ferrate preoxidation and magnetic iron (nano)particles. New design tools that allow for systematic evaluation of antifragile opportunities include artificial neural networks and virtual jar or pilot “stress testing”. Incorporating antifragile characteristics represents a trade-off with capital and/or operating cost. The presentation contains a real options analysis approach to considering costs in the context of antifragile design decisions. Adopting antifragile components will help water systems thrive in a volatile future.
Location:
Maderia Restaurant, East Providence RI
Dinner includes Portuguese food served family style with salad, coffee, and dessert. Cash bar available.
Registration:
Please pay by the date of the event using one the three ways to pay:
Please E-mail [email protected] with any questions.