Bioenvironmental
Engineering Laboratories
Four teaching laboratories are
available.
Soil
Laboratory.
The soils laboratory is equipped
with balances, ovens, pH and electrical conductivity meters, hydrometers to
measure particle size distribution, and a set of sensors to measure water
content and pressure potential in soil with data loggers to automatically
record the results. In addition, the lab is equipped with two pressure extractors
and an automatic system to measure water retention curves, and with two types
of infiltrometers that can be connected to data loggers for automatically
quantifying water movement through soils and sediments.
Unit
Process Laboratories. Two process laboratories have all
necessary analytical facilities for characterizing and quantifying physical,
chemical and biological processes in both natural and engineered systems. There
are two gas chromatography systems equipped with Flame Ionization or Electron
Capture Detector and an autosampler. There is a high performance liquid
chromatography (HPLC) system and an ion chromatography system (with
electrochemical suppression) which include an optional fraction collector for
prep-scale LC work, including gel permeation chromatography and size-exclusion
chromatography. The laboratories also house a UV-visible spectrophotometer.
For the physical-chemical unit
process laboratory, a computer-controlled flow-through reactor system with
multiple sensors allows demonstration and data acquisition of different
physical and chemical processes in a plug flow reactor (PFR), a completely mixed
flow reactor (CMFR), CMFRs in series, and other combined reactors commonly used
in water and wastewater treatment. Two jar test systems allow students to learn
physical and chemical principles governing particle-particle interactions and
removal of colloids from water. Bench scale batch reactor systems and
analytical instruments are available for characterizing chemical reactions, ion
exchange, and adsorption processes. A supercritical CO2 extractor is
used for demonstration of activated carbon regeneration in the physicochemical
unit operation laboratory course and extraction of organic pollutants (e.g.,
PAHs and PCBs) from soil and sediment matrices in the environmental analytical
chemistry course. Computer software packages for activated carbon adsorber
design, air stripper design, and modeling of pollutant distributions among
multimedia are available for the physicochemical unit process course.
For the biological unit process
course, a field assessment of water quality in stormwater ponds is conducted
using wet laboratory and Hach Kit methods such as chemical oxygen demand,
biochemical oxygen demand, bacterial indicator plate counts and nitrogen
species analysis. A module on anaerobic digestion process optimization is
carried out in small-scale serum bottle reactors with the use of gas
chromatography to quantify methane production and HPLC to quantify volatile
acids. A bioremediation project on reductive
dechlorination is conducted using field samples, microcosms, gas chromatography
to detect dechlorination products and molecular methods to detect
dechlorinating bacteria. One laboratory
is fully equipped to carry out state-of-the-art microbiological and molecular
analyses including high-quality, phase-contrast microscopes for enumeration and
identification of microbes, a complete molecular-biology station including a
24-well thermo-cycler for PCR, gel electrophoresis apparatus, and a UV light
box with camera for visualizing DNA.
Air Sampling and Analysis
Laboratory. The Air
Sampling and Analysis Laboratory provides students with experience in ambient
and indoor air sampling. It is equipped
with flow measurement devices (i.e., wet test meter, dry gas meter, bubble
calibrator, mass flow meter, rotameters, S-type and regular pitot tubes),
particle samplers (i.e., Button inhalable aerosol sampler, IOM inhalable
aerosol sampler, PM2.5 impactor, cyclone), particle measurement instruments
(i.e., optical particle counter, condensation particle counter, aerosol mass
photometer) and bioaerosol samplers (i.e., 1-stage Anderson impactor, 6-stage
Anderson impactor, portable bioaerosol sampler). Gases are analyzed by Draeger
tubes and an IAQ RAE gas monitor.
Instructional
Computing Facilities
The computing facilities consist
of three main components: Departmental administrative/educational servers and
workstations and storage, instructional computing facilities, and the Rutgers
Center for Environmental Prediction (CEP). All systems have access to the Rutgers network, the internet, and the
high-speed research network, internet2.
Instructional computing
facilities include an Instructional Computing Lab (ICL), a BioEnvironmental
Engineering Computer Lab, as well as several labs and classrooms with lcd
projectors, audio and video equipment, instructor computers, and associated
software and support. The ICL and
teaching labs and classrooms contain 25 computers for students to meet
educational and research objectives for classes, for general use outside of
classes, and for faculty and students to make presentations. The BioEnvironmental Engineering Computer Lab
also includes the software AutoCAD, HydroCAD, ArcGIS, and SimaPro. Printers, a scanner, and a large format poster
printer are available. Research groups have access to HPC computing clusters
and servers used in the modeling, computation, display, and analysis of research
data.
