NSF Award
2439081
Municipal water treatment involves chemical and physical processes to “clean” the water based upon the intake water quality. While not typically harmful, presence of tastes and odors can lead to customer dissatisfaction and skepticism about the safety and reliability of the water. Loss of customer confidence can result in loss of revenue for the financially strained utilities and/or customers turning to less healthy or less safe alternatives. To date, water treatment plant (WTP) operators typically add activated carbon in incremental doses to remove the tastes and odors. When and how much carbon is added depends on weather, intake water quality, and other factors. Ongoing research suggests that operators have developed a “sense” for how to manage the seasonal taste and odor issues at his/her plant based on years of experience. Coupling the treatment challenges and current approach with a workforce approaching retirement, and a new generation that may lack the long-term experience of managing taste and odor issues provides the motivation for this research. The research team will engage with current operators through a national-level survey, a workshop, and focus group meetings to “learn” how they make operational decisions in the treatment of taste and odors. This project is a first attempt to capture and understand the decision processes and outcomes of the experienced workforce for current and future operator decision support. <br/><br/>In this project, the research team will be facilitating collaboration across disciplines and working toward development of conceptual models of the decision-making process of operators. Ongoing research is finding that some water treatment procedures, including management of tastes and odors, depend primarily on intuition and experience rather than on definite science. This operational approach will likely pose challenges in coping with more extreme/significant events that may be prompted by growing populations and associated land changes, climatic changes, etc. As the operator workforce ages out, the next generation lacks the experience and intuition/knowledge that comes with time to adapt and respond to these changes. The project team is collecting data from current WTP operators through both qualitative and quantitative methods to document and better understand the decision-making processes related to municipal water treatment. Models of these data will allow decisions to be replicated to support improved decision support for both current and future operators.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
