LSU Team Has Another Successful Year at WERC Competition
April 20, 2020
LSU Environmental Engineering students have competed in the WERC Environmental Design Competition at New Mexico State University since 1996. When the 30th annual edition of the event went "virtual" this year, LSU Environmental Engineering teams had to immediately alter their teamwork strategies, moving from face-to-face group work in a laboratory to remote work scattered across the United States.
The virtual format consisted of written reports as usual, oral presentations to engineering practitioner judges via Zoom, and bench-scale presentations consisting of in-depth conversations with smaller groups of judges over a two-hour period. Despite differences in this year’s event compared to years passed, the LSU team had another great year, winning three Task Awards and a Judge’s Choice Award.
Students won tasks submitted by Freeport-McMoran for an algae-based remediation system (phycoremediation) for acid-mine drainage and a task submitted by Los Alamos National Laboratory for a water treatment system that recovered valuable quantities of rare earth elements (lanthanum, europium, and neodymium) from produced water.
Students also won the highly competitive open task for a project that designed unit operation to remove microplastics from wastewater. A second open task team won a Judge’s Choice Award for community involvement for its continued efforts in the blight to bioswales project in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans.
- Task 3: Heavy Metal Removal via Phycoremediation—First Place
Nafis Choudhury
Johnny Crouere
Jacob Bougere
Thinh Huynh
Natalie Nelson
Monica Nguyen
Devon Dao
Abdullah Baroun
- Task 5: Produced Water: Rare Earth Element Recovery and Clean Water Production—First Place
Sammie Parks
Raymond Poche
Emily Thompson
Bilquis Williams
Miller Warrington
Sidd Srinath
- Task 6: Design of a Microplastic Removal Process for Use in a Wastewater Treatment Plant—First Place
Emily Fertitta
Cougar Chichester
Lauren Bauhs
Garrett Melton
Chelsi Parker
Jonathan Efferson
Stephen Chamberlain
- Development of a Blight to BioSwales System to Assist New Orleans, Louisiana Storm Water System—Judge's Choice for Community Involvement
Joseph Beatty
George Carson
Bayllie Breaux
Chi Phan