This course provides students with basic knowledge of aspects of chemistry and biology relevant to water and waste treatment, pollution, renewable energy and material degradation, so that they can progress to innovative environmental engineering design in later years of the degree programme. In addition, basic environmental statistics and environmental modelling techniques are introduced, to deal with the inherent uncertainty in environmental systems.

Two lectures per week

None

None

70% Written Exam

20% Report

10% Written Assignment

The aim of this course is to introduce environmental chemistry, biologically catalysed reactions, environmental statistics and environmental modelling.

By the end of the course students will be able to:

■ quantify adsorption and desorption;

■ explain the role of catalysts;

■ describe chemical thermodynamic equilibrium;

■ derive oxidation-reduction reactions and calculate the Free Energy associated with them;

■ describe how micro-organisms gain energy for growth;

■ perform an analysis of variance;

■ fit a statistical distribution to data;

■ model a simple mixed tank bioreactor.

Students must attend the degree examination and submit at least 75% by weight of the other components of the course's summative assessment.

Students must attend the timetabled laboratory classes.

Students should attend at least 75% of the timetabled classes of the course.

Note that these are minimum requirements: good students will achieve far higher participation/submission rates.  Any student who misses an assessment or a significant number of classes because of illness or other good cause should report this by completing a MyCampus absence report.