Course of Study

MS Curriculum

The curriculum addresses the multi-disciplinary nature of the field emphasizing the theoretical, computational and experimental aspects of environmental engineering & science and environmental fluid mechanics.

It includes the study of the physical, chemical and biological processes that control fate and transport of chemicals in natural environments and determine the efficacy of engineered treatment and control measures.

MS Program

The 48 credits of the MS programme requires 41 credits of coursework and a 7-credit research project spanning 2 quarters. Courses in the 2006-2007 program of study include:

General

SSP 2120 Technical Communication Skills.
No description available.

Environmental Engineering & Science

CEE 172/SSP 172 Air Quality Management. Quantitative introduction to the engineering methods used to study and seek solutions to current air quality problems. Topics: global atmospheric changes, urban sources of air pollution, indoor air quality problems, design and efficiencies of pollution control devices, and engineering strategies for managing air quality.
CEE 270/SSP 270 Movement and Fate of Organic Contaminants in Surface Waters and Groundwater. Transport of chemical constituents in surface and groundwater, including advection, dispersion, sorption, interphase mass transfer, and transformation; water quality requirements for various beneficial uses. Emphasis is on the behavior of hazardous waste contaminants. Prerequisites: undergraduate chemistry and calculus.
CEE 271A/SSP 271A Physical and Chemical Treatment Processes. Physical and chemical unit operations for water treatment, emphasizing process combinations for drinking water supply. Application of the principles of chemistry, rate processes, fluid dynamics, and process engineering to define and solve water treatment problems by flocculation, sedimentation, filtration, disinfection, oxidation, aeration, and adsorption. Investigative paper on water supply and treatment.
CEE 271B/SSP 271B Environmental Biotechnology. Stoichiometry, kinetics, and thermodynamics of microbial processes for the transformation of environmental contaminants. Design of dispersed growth and biofilmbased processes. Applications include treatment of municipal and industrial waste waters, detoxification of hazardous chemicals, and groundwater remediation.
CEE 273/SSP 273 Aquatic Chemistry. Chemical principles and their application to the analysis and solution of problems in aqueous geochemistry (temperatures near 298 °C and atmospheric pressure). Emphasis is on the analysis of natural water systems and the understanding and solution of specific chemical problems in water purification technology and water pollution control.
CEE 273A/SSP273A Water Chemistry Laboratory. Laboratory application of techniques for the analysis of natural and contaminated waters, emphasizing instrumental techniques.
CEE 274A/SSP 274A Environmental Microbiology I. The fundamental aspects of microbiology and biochemistry. The biochemical and biophysical principles of biochemical reactions, energetics, and mechanisms of energy conservation. Diversity of microbial catabolism, flow of organic matter in nature: the carbon cycle, and biogeochemical cycles. Bacterial physiology, phylogeny, and the ecology of microbes in soil and marine sediments, bacterial adhesion, and biofilm formation. Microbes in the degradation of pollutants.
CEE 374/SSP 374 Environmental Informatics: Information and Knowledge Management in Environmental Engineering—Information systems dealing with large amounts of environmental and sustainable development data at multiple spatial-temporal scales and from crossdisciplinary research activities. Topics include: domain information modeling and processing, and interoperability; information security; knowledge management and integration in environmental engineering domain; access to information for decision making; and systematic assessment in management and engineering. The use of IT and the Internet.
CEE 376A/SSP 376A Instrumental Analysis for Environmental Investigations: Laboratory Short Course. This five-day short course teaches basic concepts and practical approaches of trace organic analysis in air, water, and soil. Covered are sampling, sample preparation, separation, identification and quantification methods for environmental contaminants, with a focus on chemical separations (chromatography) and mass spectroscopy. The student learns from reading original research reports how such techniques are applied in practice.
CEE 376B/SSP 376B Proposal Development for Environmental Investigations. This course teaches students to design experiments and field studies for environmental research based on modern analytical techniques, develop research hypotheses, develop plans for quality assurance and control, and write proposals to conduct environmental investigations. Using case studies, students evaluate the relationship between experimental design, analytical approach, and data analysis and produce a complete proposal package. Lectures in this course will be taught in part at NTU and in part by videoconference from Stanford.
SSP 6502 Contaminated Site Assessment and Remediation. Land contamination problems, biogeochemistry of the subsurface environment, fate of metals and organic contaminants in subsurface, contaminant transport processes, site investigation, remedial technologies and integrated remedial system design.
SSP 6512 Integrated Solid Waste Management. Integrated solid waste management, waste characterization, waste collection, transfer, and transport, waste recycling, reuse and recovery, biochemical conversion technologies, thermal conversion technologies, waste disposal, industrial waste management, industrial ecology and waste management.

Environmental Fluid Mechanics

CEE 265C/SSP 265C Water Resources Management. Focus is on the basic principles of surface and ground water resources management in the context of water scarcity and hydrologic uncertainty. Topics include reservoir, river basin, and aquifer management, conjunctive use of surface and ground water, wastewater reuse, and demand management. Considers technical, economic, social, and political elements of water management.
CEE 262A/SSP 262A Hydrodynamics. The flow of incompressible viscous fluid; emphasis is on developing an understanding of fluid dynamics that can be applied to environmental flows. Topics: kinematics of fluid flow; equations of mass and momentum conservation (including density variations); some exact solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations; appropriate analysis of fluid flows including Stokes flows, potential flows, and laminar boundary layers; and an introduction to the effects of rotation and stratification through scaling analysis of fluid flows.
CEE 262B/SSP 262B Transport and Mixing in Surface Water Flows. Application of fluid mechanics to problems of pollutant transport and mixing in the water environment. Mathematical and numerical models of advection, diffusion, and dispersion. Application of theory to problems of transport and mixing in rivers, estuaries, and lakes and reservoirs.
CEE 262C/SSP 262C Introduction to mathematical and computational methods for modeling and simulation and the use of the Simulink toolbox in Matlab to cover topics including transport, air and water quality, reservoir, and global climate modeling. Course is application driven; students work in groups on three projects with an extensive final project.
CEE 264A/SSP 264A Rivers, Streams and Canals. Introduction to the movement of water through natural and engineered channels, streams, and rivers. Basic equations and theory (mass, momentum, and energy equations) for steady and unsteady descriptions of the flow. Application of theory to the design of flood- control and canal systems. Flow controls such as weirs and sluice gates; gradually varied flow; Saint-Venant equations and flood waves; and method of characteristics. Open channel flow laboratory experiments: controls such as weirs and gates, gradually varied flow, and waves.
CEE 265C/SSP 265C Water Resources Management. Focus is on the basic principles of surface and ground water resources management in the context of water scarcity and hydrologic uncertainty. Topics include reservoir, river basin, and aquifer management, conjunctive use of surface and ground water, wastewater reuse, and demand management. Considers technical, economic, social, and political elements of water management.

PhD Program

The 24 credits needed for the PhD program can be drawn from the current course offering at NTU and Stanford. Students, in consultation with their faculty advisers, will develop a course of study best suited to their research topics.