SEES Fellows: Enabling Energy Efficiency through Integrated Utilities - Technical and Social Challenges to Forward Osmosis Microbial Bioreactors

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An essential feature of sustainable urban design is the maximization of resource productivity through efficient exchange of "waste" streams. Forward Osmosis Microbial Bioreactors (FOMBRs) are a novel water reuse technology with the potential to alleviate the growing tension between energy and water resources. Rather than decoupling energy from water, FOMBRs integrate the processes of energy production, wastewater treatment, and drinking water purification in a symbiotic exchange of material byproducts. This project will probe the technical and social challenges to FOMBR implementation.The engineering/materials-related effort will leverage advances in materials science to alleviate membrane biofouling in Forward Osmosis systems for wastewater reuse. Grafted polymeric coatings with different physicochemical properties will be compared, and the interaction between membranes and developing biofilms will be characterized. Feasibility tests and analysis of membrane performance will be carried out on a FOMBR pilot treating municipal sewage from the Ben-Gurion University campus in Israel. The project will also address the urban infrastructure, economic, regulatory, and sociopolitical barriers to FOMBR implementation in a three-tiered approach. Tier one will employ industrial ecology and economic models, including geoinformatics, cost-benefit analysis, social network analysis, and system dynamics, to identify policies that incentivize byproduct transfer among utilities. Tier two integrates sub-models into a generically descriptive system dynamics model and identifies policy deployment scenarios to accelerate FOMBR implementation. Tier three applies systems research in an urban case study to evaluate policy validity under discrete conditions. This project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. With SEES Fellows support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish themselves in an independent research career related to sustainability.