R&D Session held on “Treatment of Effluent using Low Cost Adsorbents” & “Ground Penetrating Radar”

The Civil Engineering department had its ninth session under R&D cell on the 14^th January 2022 at 4.00 P.M. The two speakers for this session were Asst. Prof. Prachi Dessai and Asst. Prof. Jeffrey Valadares. The former presented a study undertaken by her along with her project students, while the latter presented on a recent trend in Civil Engineering.

Prof. Prachi presented on ‘Treatment of Effluent using Low Cost Adsorbents’. She addressed the major problems leading to waste water pollution viz. increasing population, industralisation and untreated sewage.  She highlighted on the need to treat the effluents to reduce the surface water and ground water sources and also save the aquatic environment. In her presentation, she discussed about adsorbents used previously by other researches to treat effluents, such as banana peels, fish scales, etc.

In her study, Prof. Prachi and her students used mango wood and teak wood powder to treat waste water samples collected from STP Shirvodem,Navelim in Goa (Pic. 1). Varying amounts of these samples were added to the waste water and the waste water was later tested for BOD, COD, turbidity and pH. The result indicated that the mango wood had promising result in reducing the BOD, COD and turbidity.

Prof. Jeffrey presented on ‘Ground Penetrating Radar’. He explained the working of a ground penetrating radar (GPR) (Pic. 2). He gave a brief review of its applications in transportation engineering, archeological surveys, sub-structural investigations and other utilities such as underground cables and cavities.