Introduction
Over the past twenty years, the knowledge and understanding of wastewater treatment has advanced extensively and moved away from empirically-based approaches to a fundamentally-based ‘first principles’ approach embracing chemistry, microbiology, physical and bioprocess engineering, and mathematics. Many of these advances have matured to the degree that they have been codified into mathematical models for simulation by computers.
For a new generation of young scientists and engineers entering the wastewater treatment profession, the quantity, complexity and diversity of these new developments can be overwhelming, particularly in developing countries where access is not readily available to advanced level courses in wastewater treatment. This Online Course on Biological Wastewater Treatment: Principles, Modelling and Design seeks to address that deficiency. It assembles and integrates the postgraduate course material of a dozen or so professors from research groups around the world that have made significant contributions to the advances in wastewater treatment.
The internet-based curriculum on biological wastewater treatment consists of a more than 40 hours of video-recorded lectures by the author professors all compiled into a DVD package available to those registered for the online course, and of the textbook, lecture handouts, and tutorial exercises for students’ self-study (included and provided after enrollment in the paid online course).