DETAILED PLAN OF STUDY
Research proposal for commonwealth scholarship application-environmental science
You should describe clearly your research question, the methodology that you will use and the potential significance of the study to your discipline. You should also justify why you want to study at each of the institutions and with the supervisor(s) listed in your application. Although the Selection Panel will be well-informed professionals, remember that they are not likely to be specialists in your subject.
Nowadays, Environmental Science plays a vital role in the world as the environment is being put under constantly increasing pressure. Although I am fascinated by the idea of acquiring greater knowledge in Environmental science and the various topics in it, I am particularly interested in the topic of recovering nutrients such as phosphorus from wastewater, and as such, I would like to conduct my PhD reached on this topic.
Phosphorus is a non-renewable and non-replaceable nutrient that is essential for plants growth and production. 70% of phosphorus is mainly used as a fertilizer for agricultural crop growth and animals feed. However, uprising population growth and changes in the diet as a result of rising living standards have resulted in a high agricultural demand for phosphorus, which is leading to its depletion. If no action is taken to solve this issue, phosphorus will be depleted within next 50-100 years. Although phosphorus is essential for plant growth, mismanagement of this nutrient can pose a serious threat to water quality. Thus, high concentrations of phosphorus in rivers and dams cause eutrophication, which can be detrimental to human and aquatic life
More recently, methods to recover phosphorus from current consumption have been gaining significant attention as a keystone in sustainable development. Sewage is an important source of phosphorus and therefore offers a great opportunity for phosphorus recovery and can play an important role in the societal move towards phosphorus sustainability while minimizing adverse environmental and social impacts.
Although there are various available technologies that are currently been used to recover phosphorus, most of them are not efficient, economically viable and environmentally friendly and requires a lot of energy, thus only a few sewage works around the world are currently recovering phosphorus from sewage.
Recently, an emerging membrane technology known as Forward Osmosis (FO) has been attracting a great attention. A major advantage of this technology is the low energy consumption and high pollutant rejection rate, its low fouling propensity, and has appeared to be a great potential for application in nutrient, energy and water recovery by integration with other technologies.
Although FO has been studied for phosphorus recovery from different waste streams, direct recovery from sewage has rarely been attempted.
The low strength of sewage water is the main barrier to direct phosphorus recovery, which can only take place if the phosphorus and calcium in the sewage are concentrated sufficiently through FO. However, it is still unclear, how the quality of the sewage and the 'draw' solution affect the concentration of phosphorus.
Methodology
The overall aim is to design an advanced FO system that can efficiently and directly recover phosphorus from raw sewage, in order to address the need for clean water and minimisation of water pollution. It will generate new understanding and provide dynamic information to expand the application of FO to direct phosphorus recovery from sewage, leading to a significantly simplified phosphorus recovery process, reduced costs and increased environmental friendliness.
Specific objectives that will be met to address this question include:
·Designing and building FO-based direct phosphorus recovery set-up, consisting of an FO unit, precipitation unit and draw solution regeneration unit.
·Characterize sewage from three sewage works, especially for metal ion content.
·Investigating the effects of sewage quality and draw solution on concentration and precipitation by operating the FO-based process.
·Optimize operation for concentration in FO unit and precipitation in the precipitate unit.
The project main outcomes
The proposed research project has great potential to recover phosphorus directly from municipal wastewater for fertilizer production, with clean water as co-product. The concentration of organic pollutants by FO when concentrating phosphorus also offers opportunities to recover energy from low strength sewage. Therefore, the proposed work on FO is a foundation for phosphorus, water and energy recovery from low strength sewage, which could be applied either separately for single resource recovery or collectively for multiple resources recovery in combination with other technologies. Ultimately, this project work would be of great benefit not only to the water municipalities but to the water industries as a whole.
I choose to study my PhD degree at either the University of Southampton, Reading or Sheffield University primarily because of their internationally renowned environmental research programmes which commensurate perfectly with my proposed research project.
These are prestigious research institutions with exceptional resources, including state of the art laboratories, an affiliate science center, and renowned faculties. Their environmental science faculties offer research projects that directly address the world biggest problems including nutrients depletion. Through a huge network of partnerships and collaborations, their aim is to apply emerging technologies to find solutions to the current environmental problems. I intend to gain a wide breadth of training in hydrology, environmental mineralogy and analytical chemistry as I know that industries are looking for specialists who have an understanding of these, how it can be used, its benefits and limitations.
I am currently busy applying for the admission at the nominated universities and I already found one prospective supervisor, Dr Yongqiang Liu from Southampton University. She specializes in sustainable wastewater treatment with concerns of water quality and nutrient recover and I believe her research work fit right into my intended area of study and I believe that working with her would be an excellent way for me to improve my research abilities and better understand and address the challenges affecting the environment.
Obtaining a PhD in one of the selected institutions would not only provide me with more specific knowledge and research opportunities, but it will serve as a foundation to fulfil my career goal of becoming an environmental scientist specializing in water.