event
Friday 03 Feb 2017: Development of decision support systems for optioneering the treatment of (waste)water and water reuse; ways forward to overcome global water scarcity issues
Dr Seyed Mohammad Kazem Sadr - Centre for Water Systems
Room 170, Harrison 14:00-15:00
Freshwater scarcity has become one of the most challenging issues and needs worldwide attention. Although a considerable progress has been made to develop sustainable water management strategies and fit for the purpose (waste)water treatment alternatives, their cost effective implementation and smooth operation still remains a challenge in many countries. Since the technology selection is a complex process and requires consideration to several aspects to meet a range of objectives, an easy to use decision support tool (DST) for technology selection could help in identifying optimal solutions and facilitating improved provision of safe water supplies. Decision making for the selection of water systems (e.g. water/wastewater treatment technologies and water use/saving devices) at both community and city scales requires consideration to economic, technical, social and environmental aspects. The decision making process also involves engagement with a range of stakeholders such as environmental regulators, policy makers and end users, with each having different priorities and perspectives.
Here an overview of advanced water and wastewater treatment technologies will be presented. I also present the development of two novel decision support tools: WETSUiT (WatEr Treatment decision SUpport software Tool) and WiSDOM (WaStewater Decision support OptiMiser). WETSUiT and WiSDOM are multi-device applications in which both Many-Objective Optimization (MOO) and Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) are employed. Both helps to identify optimal treatment technologies combinations/configurations at community and city scales for various contexts. The technology selection process takes into account a number of sustainability related selection criteria, constraints including availability of resources (e.g. land, skill requirement, energy etc.) and quality of raw (waste)water needing treatment.
About the speaker
Dr Seyed Mohammad Kazem Sadr is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in water and wastewater engineering at the Centre for Water Systems (CWS), University of Exeter, UK. Seyed has joined the CWS in 2014 once he obtained his PhD at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Surrey, UK. During his PhD he worked on the evaluation of different membrane technologies for water / wastewater treatment in different contexts (mainly focusing on developing countries). During his PhD, he also developed a number of multi-criteria based decision support systems to assess the applicability of membrane processes e.g. fuzzy logic based multi criteria multi expert decision making tool, integrated analytic hierarchy process - preference ranking organization for enrichment evaluation approach.
In his current role, he has been appointed as the main researcher working on two EU funded projects; Water4India (successfully ended in August 2016) and SARASWATI. In these two projects Dr Sadr has led three work packages with the main focus on the development of decision support tools (WETSUiT, DoWET and WiSDOM). The tools are necessary for identification/evaluation of optimal system configurations for water treatment, wastewater treatment, water saving devices in India.
Dr Sadr has produced and co-authored several journal articles, technical reports and project deliverables, and has presented at several prestigious conferences. He has also published a high impact peer reviewed book chapter on membrane technologies. Since started his PhD studies, Dr Sadr has been an active referee/reviewer of a number of international journals (Inc. Journal of Environmental Management and Environmental Science & Pollution Research) and has a good track record of teaching and student supervision in the field of civil and environmental engineering.
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