Alphabet Gumbo at WEFTEC 2024

 It has been an age since I blogged here. I first started blogging in 2012 and since then I’ve been nothing if consistent in my inconsistency, but I’m hoping to change that. We’ll see! To get me back in the swing of blogging I thought I’d have a bit of fun with the plethora of acronyms in our industry. At WEFTEC in New Orleans this year I asked one of my colleagues to visit a vendor to talk about “SAF.” She did so, expecting to talk about “sludge air flotation” only to be faced with a conversation about “sustainable aviation fuel”! Whoops. I broke the rule about defining my terms. So, what the heck, here goes with a whole alphabet soup of TLAs and other acronyms. To the first person that can unscramble what the heck I’m talking about, I’ll buy you an IPA next time we meet…

On Sunday I attended a workshop where someone from HRSD spoke about ML/AI for their BNR using ABAC, AvN and PdNA. I don’t recall if XGBoost was better than OLS, but it was all very interesting.

In one of the sessions there was a discussion about PFAS. Turns out that PFAS is a PFAS that’s easier to remove than the PFAS called PFBS. Who knew?

Many of the speakers were very well qualified with MS, PhD, PE, BCEE, and ENV SP to name a few. Which reminds me I need to record my PDHs. I know others were more concerned with their CEUs, of course.

One of my favorite topics is EBPR, or more correctly S2EBPR which is an enhanced EBPR where the PAOs can make better use of the VFAs and other rbCOD. You have to watch out for GAO’s of course, but if you have dPAOs you’re more efficient in using the VFA but only if you have an AX. There was discussion about using AO or A2O, which depends if you have a MLR (or NRCY as the HRSD folks like to call it) and you have to check your C to P ratio. I forgot to ask if the FM or SRT were significant factors. I’m sure they are.

N2O is a thorny issue for many. It’s a potent GHG of course. Folks doing SND are worried it might be an issue for them causing high EFs. But the CF of a WRRF is not just about GHGs so you need to look at it more broadly. In fact we should really take a bigger picture view using LCA to look at all environmental impacts. Don’t you agree?

I didn’t hear much talk about SVIs this year, nor SPA, but maybe I just missed those talks about AGS or EDIs.

On my flight back (MSY to HOU of course), I was thinking about another project where we’re looking at QACs (or is that QATs?). We need to check the LOD and LOQ for the DADMAC we’re most interested in. It might not be in range.

OK, I think I’m done. If you can figure out what the heck I’m talking about, well done!  Or if you cheat and ask a LLM to figure it out for you - shame on you!

What’s your favorite TLA?

A Rose by Any Other Name

OK, I turn 50 later this year and I'm wondering if that's old enough to officially be a grumpy old man? My reason for asking is I realize that there's something that bugs me.  I hate buzzwords.  Actually I don't think it's a grumpy old man thing as I've always had a dislike for buzzwords along with an even stronger distaste for using unnecessarily complicated or pretentious language. I'm sure I'm guilty of using both, but nothing pleases me more than explaining complicated ideas using plain and simple language. In my mind the responsibility for good communication lies with the person doing the communicating. If they can't get across what they're saying so that the intended audience understands it nice and clearly then they need to try again. The person reading or listening should not have to consult a dictionary or Google the latest buzzword list because someone is trying to appear cool or more intelligent.

Buzzkill

Now I should be careful, I guess, because there is the argument that putting a new name to something can create a "buzz" (I guess that's why it's a buzzword?). It can create new interest in something old. There's also the argument that sometimes a new word or expression captures an idea or concept better somehow than however it was expressed in the past. Still I can't shake the thought that it's often the case that someone is trying to say something is new, when really it's just repackaging of an old idea and giving it a new name.  Like I said, I may really be a grumpy old man already!

OK, OK, grumpy old man, give us some examples so we can see what you're talking about. Alrighty then young whipper-snapper, here is my "top 5" (or is that bottom 5?) of buzzwords that rub me the wrong way, starting from the least offensive to the one that will cause me to use almost cuss words...

1. Circular economy

This one used to bug me a lot more, but I've slowly warmed up to it. It basically means to use life cycle thinking about a product or process and the way it affects the environment. Having done a fair bit of work on life cycle assessments (LCA) to look at environmental impacts it really bothered me when people used the expression "circular economy" to say the same thing, more or less.  But, I guess if you use "economy" in an expression then the bean counters will pay attention, and maybe it's a snappier title than having to explain a whole bunch of concepts with life cycles? I don't know. I give this just 2.5 out of 5 on my grump-o-meter. 

2. Value proposition

Hmmm, I remember the first time I was in meeting and someone kept talking about "value propositions" and I had no clue, so I leaned over to my colleague and asked him what the heck it means. "It means a business case." Ah.  Then why not say "business case" then? I should add that I'm a technical poop engineer and until that time I'd managed to avoid the cold realities of business stuff and business-speak, but here I am now dealing with a different type of fecal linguistics. Yeah, "value proposition" still rubs me the wrong way, but it's here to stay I guess.  3.0 on the grump-o-meter... unless you want to really get my juices flowing and shorten it to "value prop." and then I'll give you 3.5 or even 4.0.

3. Digital twin

I have to be careful with this one so that I don't violate my own dislike of pretentiousness. I've worked with computer models for more than 20 years and messed around with computers since the 1980's (yup I had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum and I was proud of it!). So here we are in 2020 and all of a sudden everything is freakin' "digital."  Arghh.  So, a "digital twin" is in fact a "computer model."  Why we can't say that I don't know.  Definitely a 3.5 on my grump-o-meter despite the fact that I use the term myself now on occasion as it's creeping into more conversations... and hate myself for doing so, just a little.

4. Totex

OK, I tried to look this up on Wikipedia to give you an official definition, but I think it's beneath them to even have this. According to Wikipedia it's a Japanese company that makes weather balloons. I actually much prefer that over the current vogue in the UK water sector where TOTEX is the name given to accounting for both operating expenses (OPEX) and the capital expenditure (CAPEX) in a project combined as... you guessed it... TOTEX, short for "total expenditure" or something like that I guess. It's an all new and fancy way of looking at projects... no wait a minute. It's a basic economic evaluation of operating and capital costs or value over time that's been called a "net present value" (NPV) or "net present cost" for years and years. That's how we've evaluated every project I've ever worked on since I was a poop engineer, I think. So what's new and shiny about "Totex"? Nothing.  It's a basic and sensible economic evaluation that every sensible engineer has done since they graduated from university. 4.9 on my grump-o-meter. Please do shoot me if I ever use the expression. Or at least slap me very hard.

5. Ideation

Number 5 and an easy 5.0 on my grump-o-meter. Who came up with this word? It's not a real word. Let me go and slap them a little. Oh wait, it's an old word from 1818, though it appears it was originally a psychiatric term for suicidal thoughts.  Huh, I'd never have guessed.  Still, it's current usage is slap-worthy.  It's a precocious way of saying "idea generation" or "brainstorming," but only if you think you're a cool person. Please, don't. It's really not cool.

OK so that was my rant for the day. I should say that I really don't feel too strongly about any of these words if you really, really do want to use them. Go ahead. I won't slap you really. Well not much. In my next post perhaps I'll make the pitch to have the word "squoze" added to the dictionary. English is, after-all, a consensus language!

I'd better go and ideate a new digital twin, being careful to include totex in my value proposition under the nexus of the circular economy.

WAH WAH WAH

No I'm not crying yet, but I am limiting the amount of news I watch now we're in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.  It's serious enough without the media hype, so I think I'll read the news on LinkedIn or other less hyperbolic outlets for a while.

Photo by Marco Albuquerque on Unsplash

The topic for this blog is related to what's going on right now - working at home (WAH) - which is what a whole bunch of people are being forced to do in order to limit the spread of the virus. This is also know as telecommuting, working from home (WFH), teleworking, mobile working, remote working and who knows what else. But I prefer "WAH" just because that's what I used to put on our out of office sheet (a lot!) when I worked in Kansas City and it sounds like I'm a big baby!

In a previous blog I talked about the work-life balance/blend and in it I mentioned listing out the pros and cons of WAH and so, given that so many of us are stuck at home working now, I thought I'd take a shot at listing my own perspective on the pros and cons from working at home a fair amount over the years, as well as some pitfalls to avoid your WAH becoming "wah, wah, wah"! So here goes with 10 of each...

10 Pros of WAH

1. No commute. Whether you have to fight traffic or fight the crowds in the subway, there's no denying it's a lot less stressful shuffling off to your home office or kitchen table in your bunny slippers (see Pro item 3).
2. An extra hour or two in your day.  Linked to not having to commute, but in my mind worth separating out as a benefit on its own, is that the time you used to spend traveling to and from work is wasted time that you now get back to use as you see fit. Many people make the most of that time by listening to podcasts, making calls, listening to audiobooks etc. but to me that's more that they're making the most of a bad situation. If you WAH you can listen to that favorite podcast when you want, make a call that won't drop, or actually read a real book!
3. Very relaxed dress code. Sure, wear your bunny slippers. Heck wear a onesie if you feel like it.  Hmmm, maybe not if you're going to do any video conferencing.
4. Better connectivity and IT. I need to be careful here so that I don't offend my employer, and maybe it's because I'm a geek with my own preferences when it comes to computer stuff, but over the years I've generally had a better internet connection at home (thanks Xfinity), and a printer and scanner that work better than the office one. Also, I can use my own Mac or iPad when my work laptop is grinding to a halt because of Windows issues or the standard software I can't configure gets bogged down for random reasons. Now, I must say that my current work laptop is working a whole lot better than some have in the past and, generally speaking, the days of my laptop grinding to a halt are mostly gone.
5. Better coffee. If you've read my previous post, you knew this one was coming.  Whether you're a Nespresso fan like me, or you grind your own favorite beans, or pick out your fave K-cup, you generally have a better selection and control over what you can drink at home.  Many offices are pretty good in stepping up their game in the coffee department - our office provides a Keurig machine - but unless you work at a fancy startup that has candy bowls and it's own barista, you can generally get better coffee at your own abode.
6. Flexible working hours. This is where I should refer back to the work-life balance/blend article. If you do it right then the flexibility of shifting your work hours can be really useful. You can do that with a job where you go to an office but it's much easier to do it when you're working from home.
7. Lower your carbon footprint. Well maybe.  According to this article it depends. I think in my case the GHG emissions from driving my little hybrid to the office is probably balanced by the need for the AC in our house when I WAH. I should check...
8. Dogs. Yup, I share my home office with my dogs (and a cat sometimes). They are awesome. Now if I could take them to the main office, perhaps...?
9. Your own refrigerator. Your favorite snacks, leftovers... all in your very own refrigerator. You don't have to share the space with the rest of the office, and it's not all thrown out on Friday afternoon by the cleaners, your favorite container and all (well not in our house!).
10. The bar. My company has strict alcohol policies that forbid booze to even be on their premises.  In my house it's perfectly legal. When 5 o'clock comes around...

10 Woes of WAH

OK, you can see my obvious bias with the long list of "pros" for WAH. But it's not all roses.  Here are  some downsides to WAH...

1. No in-person communication. Yeah you can overcome this somewhat with video chat, if you can persuade your shy co-workers to turn on their camera, but it's not quite the same. And when it comes to group calls hmmm, that can be an amusing challenge...
2. Working longer hours. In the "pros" I highlighted the time you get back from not having to commute, but it's easy for that to become extra work time. You need to manage that carefully to avoid burnout.
3. No decompression/transition time. Ironically, that long commute that I listed as a negative in the previous list, is actually useful for some people as a time to transition from work to home life (particularly if you're listening to your Podcast on how to deal with stress at work!). Without that some folks struggle to transition out of their work mode to home mode.
4. Work-life blur. So there's work-life balance, or the flexibility of work-life blend, but what can happen is that you never turn off from work.  Now this can happen even if you don't work from home, but I think it's a bigger danger when you do WAH. Checking e-mails in the evening and as soon as you wake in the morning are tell-tale signs your work is dominating everything and the balance/blend is just a blur.
5. Interruptions. When we bought our house in Texas we purposely looked for one with an office, so I'm generally well set up to avoid interruptions, but if you're using common space like the kitchen or, like many poor souls right now you're having to manage your kids home from school and try to work at the same time, it can be a challenge. I'm guessing there are many BBC dads out there right now. I feel for ya.
6. No meeting space. Right now we're practicing "social distancing" to combat the spread of the coronavirus, but when we get back to normal business life, one challenge of WAH is you don't have a place to meet people in person. It would be kind of weird and unprofessional to meet people at your home, unless you know them really well, so then you're stuck with arranging a meeting at a coffee shop maybe. But what about meeting or presenting with multiple people? There are ways of doing it, but they're not as easy and convenient as using the common spaces and meeting rooms of most offices.
7. Reduced office facilities. For some reason FedEx doesn't pick up from my house every evening and despite my bragging about superior IT at home, I have no way of printing out full- or half-sized drawings.  There are just some things provided in an office setting that aren't there at home. So you have to figure that out (Thanks FedEx and UPS)
8. VPN and Internet Woes. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) allows you to connect to your corporate network via the internet over a secure connection. Very useful and very smart... and slow and not always available. Again, this is much better today than it was a few years ago, but still it can be a source of pain sometimes.
9. No water cooler conversations. I think this is an American idiom, but it basically means those unplanned conversations you have when you meet a colleague in a common space or in the corridor. Sometimes they are very useful and fruitful. When you're holed up at home you don't have those opportunities or conversations except with your significant other or the dog!
10. Personal hygiene.  Not sure how to put this delicately, but just a week into us all working from home, I'm noticing some of my colleagues on video chat have maybe not shaved as frequently as they used to.  For sure I'm guilty as charged. 

Avoiding Pitfalls

On balance I definitely see the pros of WAH outweigh the woes, but beyond that, and being stuck at home whether we like it or not, we can overcome some of the downsides if we think about them a little. Here are a few tips to help overcome some of the pitfalls of WAH.

1. Set a schedule. In order to avoid overworking and the danger of work-life blur, be intentional about setting your daily schedule. Try to work fixed hours as you would in the office setting, but use the flexibility to suit you when you need it, still making sure you work the hours you need to, and not too much more.
2. Take a break.  Linked to the schedule, make sure to take breaks, go for a walk (take the dogs!), have a lunch break etc.  At the end of your working time, take time to decompress and transition out of your work mode if you need to.
3. Take care of yourself. For the sake of your significant other and your own dignity, please take a shower! Exercise and eat well.  These apply as much for WAH as working in an office.
4. Be gracious, flexible and lighten-up.  It can be a bit weird to work from home, so let's cut each other some slack. Enjoy the "pros," and help each other in dealing with the cons by being a little more understanding and flexible ourselves.  And let's have fun with it all. Life's too short not to!

So, there is my take on WAH. I'd be interested to hear other's thoughts and experiences, so please share in the comments section.

Resilient Wastewater Treatment

It has been a while since I've blogged, perhaps because I don't feel like I had anything original to say since last time?!  What I have been pondering of late is the topic of resilience (or resiliency if you prefer.)

What is Resilient Wastewater Treatment?

Resilience isn't a new topic in the world of water, but having moved to Houston, Texas a couple of years ago it's certainly a hot topic in this part of the world.  Interestingly the notion of resilience became a big deal in Texas in the area of water supply through the 2011-2015 drought and indeed where you hear the term most is in relation to being able to provide a robust water supply no matter what the weather may not bring. Then along came Hurricane Harvey and all of a sudden all the talk about resilience that had been focused on lack of water was faced with dealing with too much water! So for water resources, the topic of resilience is tied to dealing with too much or too little water.  But what about resilience in the context of wastewater treatment?

There are many definitions for resilience, but a simple and useful one I found comes right from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” Now breaking this down a little we need to think about what we need our plants to be resilient against (the "misfortune"), and what facets or features we need in order to "recover from or adjust easily to" said misfortune, which I'll do in the next couple of sections.

Facing Misfortune

So what misfortunes might our wastewater treatment plants face?  The very nature of all municipal wastewater treatment facilities and many industrial facilities is very dynamic, with diurnal flows and loads, seasonal shifts, having to deal with flows no matter what is coming down the pipe and managing all of this even if pieces and parts of the plant break down now and then.  None of this could be classed as "misfortune" as it's within the realm of the normal operation of the facility and it's what it's designed to do.
I'd like to suggest 5 potential misfortunes we should consider if we want to make our facilities more resilient:

1. Excessive Flows - I guess you could argue that many facilities have a maximum flow above which they're not expected to give full treatment (which is a whole can of worms), but having lived through the deluge of Harvey and having worked on plants with very high "peaking factors" when the rains come, I think this is worth categorizing as a misfortune, particularly as we see more frequent and extreme wet weather in many parts of the world.
2. Power Outages - In most facilities, particularly those above a certain size, it's common to have some kind of back-up electricity generation, but even with these, no plant is 100% invulnerable to power outages, and most plants use plenty of pumps and aeration devices that need continuous power in order to function.
3. Toxicity (Chemical, biological, or radiological) - Either through mishap, some industry not thinking through the possible impact of dumping off-spec materials, or even some nefarious person seeking to cause mischief, the introduction of too high a load of certain chemicals or biological or radiological agents into a sewer system can cause acute or chronic toxicity to biological treatment systems.  I was part of a team that investigated some ways to handle this in a WERF project a few years ago.
4. Physical Damage - From someone accidentally dropping a wrench into a mechanism, or something large or sharp finding it's way down the sewer, to the same nefarious individual from misfortune #3 deciding to blow up the poop plant, or even the more likely scenario of an earthquake there are misfortunes that can cause physical damage to the plant and it's equipment.
5. Cyber Attack - In the age of the "internet of things" (IoT), no list of potential dangers is complete without thinking about potential cyber attacks.  When the North Korean/Chinese/Russian/American hackers get bored with trying to cause mayhem on the more high profile infrastructure like nuclear power plants, they could turn their attention to the more mundane target of a poop plant.  Might not be able to persuade Chris Hemsworth to be in that movie though...

Facets of a Resilient Treatment System

OK, so we've thought about potential mishaps that might hit our plant. What features do we want in order to be able to handle them?  When I initially thought about this I came up with a list of 7 that included things like simplicity and criticality, but I then boiled it down to just 4, particularly as I thought about the definition of resilience as being able to "recover from or adjust easily to" and in trying to apply the ideas to a wastewater treatment system. So here they are:

1. Autonomous - a system that needs little or no attention. It just works on its own.
2. Dormancy capabilities - if the system is shut down, there are no problems when it starts up again.
3. Rugged - can the process handle extreme conditions outside its normal operation? It may only give partial treatment, but it does not fail completely.
4. Flexible (multipurpose) - When the proverbial does hit the fan, can the system be used for other helpful things other than what it was designed to do? In an emergency situation it could be good to have something that has the flexibility to be re-purposed.

 Bringing the Ideas Together - Technology Assessment

So, I've thrown out a few ideas and defined some terms. In order to test the usefulness of the ideas, I decided to try scoring different technologies in terms of the the 4 features versus their ability to withstand the 5 potential hazards.  The list I chose and the scoring are pretty subjective, but it was a fun exercise.  The table below shows my scoring of the features for 16 different treatment technology types on the left side of the table (I used a simple 1 to 5 scale with 5 being good), and then scoring their ability to withstand the various hazard categories on the right side of the table (also scoring from 1 to 5, for bad to best).  For the features I combine the scores for each technology into an overall "Resiliency Feature Index" where an index of 1.0 would be perfect; then I created a similar index in combining the scores that I called "Overall Resiliency Index".  The result is a pretty color map that doesn't show a whole lot yet (but be patient, there's more...).

WWTP Resilience Matrix

 Next I took the indices and plotted them against each other to produce the far more intriguing graph below.

Now what do we see? A few things:

• Simpler processes, particularly those that don't use biological treatment, sit in the top right hand corner with a high Resiliency Feature Index and consequently high Overall Resiliency Index (high resiliency zone)
• Biological systems that are the most mechanically complex sit in the bottom left hand corner (low resiliency zone).
• The majority of the processes I selected sit somewhere in the middle of the graph (mid-range resiliency)

None of this is particularly surprising, I don't think, given the way I've defined resilience and in thinking through how each technology might respond to each of the 5 hazard types.  It's hard to picture a simple screen or primary clarifier being susceptible to a Cyber attack or chemical attack.  And even an excessive flow will get some treatment even if you overload the hydraulics to spilling point.  Conversely if you hack into the control system of a BAF or MBR, that's not pretty. Throw some toxic substance into them or push the flows to the extreme and they don't like it!

One last comment from this very rough and ready assessment - mostly just a way for me to think through the ideas and concepts - is in trying to tease out the differences in the mid-range zone which encompasses most of the technologies we use.  Something that did stand out to me was that I scored biofilm-based technologies higher, particularly when I think about the impact of excessive flows and power outages.  Getting back to my preamble about Harvey and the definition of resilience in Texas shifting to how we deal with extreme wet weather, this makes me think that perhaps treatment technologies such as MBBR and MABR might be a better fit than processes based on suspended growth.

OK, I'm done.  I'm happy to argue about my subjective scores over a beer or two, but you're buying!

Work-life balance or blend?

In my job I travel a lot. I work on projects across different time zones. I like coffee.

About a year ago we moved to Houston and, although I’m officially based in our Houston office, I often work from home. It’s a habit I picked up in Kansas but now I’m in Houston with a reasonably long commute when the traffic is bad - as it often is in Houston - it’s tough for me to drag my butt to the office. Add to that the fact that my wife set me up with a nice office at home and bought a fancy Nespresso machine and the commute really loses it’s appeal. Did I mention I like coffee?

I could write a blog on the pros and cons of working from home versus the office but it’s pretty clear where I stand on the issue... I thought instead it would be worthwhile discussing the thorny issue of managing your time when you’re a remote worker.

Balancing Act

One approach to managing your time when working from home is to “clock in” and “clock out” at the same time you would if you were heading into the office. This takes some discipline but hey, you already saved the hour commute into work and the hour back, so it’s worth the effort. There are two major benefits to this approach: 

1. You’re in sync with the office
2. You get to balance work time with home time better. 

I think the first benefit is self-evident but perhaps the latter needs a little unpacking. One of the big dangers with working from home is that you never stop working.  Your 9 to 5 becomes an 8 to 8 (am to pm that is) and your work to life balance gets way out of whack. The stress from commuting is replaced by plain old over-working stress. I've been there, done that, got the T-shirt, when I was based in an office, so I certainly don't want to repeat that mistake when working from home.

Now I should back up and mention that I've never been one for watching the clock. One of my early bosses once said that if you're the kind of employee that's always watching the clock then you're not the kind of employee he wanted.  I appreciate some flexibility in the hours I'm working.  Poop engineers generally work on multiple projects, billing their time to several each week using the beloved timesheet (ah, second only to expense forms as the most hated business tool in existence), and the mystical project numbers. As long as I do 40 hours of useful work in the week it doesn't really matter how that was completed, within reason.

House Blend

I think it was my current boss that I first heard use the expression "work-life blend" and it resonated with me. As I mentioned previously in this post, poop engineers work on multiple projects.  This means my workload varies quite widely.  There are days where I have deadlines to meet but still someone needs a piece of advice or help that was unscheduled.  On those days it's not unusual to have to work into the evenings.  As someone who works with colleagues around the world, it's also common for me to have a conference call in the evenings. In parallel with this I may have obligations with family and friends or my church. My wife takes it pretty easy on me with "honey-do's" but still I have a few.  How do you manage that with a fixed, evenly balanced work day? The answer is, you don't.  So you have the option of just being a workaholic, e-mail junkie - been there and still don't like the T-shirt - or seek a different approach.

Enter the "work-life blend." The gist of this approach is that you don't compartmentalize your life into work time and private time, but you blend the two. I found a nice article on Forbes by Ron Ashkenas titled "Forget Work-Life Balance: It's Time for Work-Life Blend" which is about perfect for this blog!!!  He discusses how we should acknowledge how work intrudes into our personal lives in the connected world in which we now live and rather than fighting it, look for ways to integrate the two and manage it.  The two implications he highlights are (1) less guilt for working outside of traditional hours and (2) the need for greater flexibility in how and when we work.

Bringing it Home

So what do I do?  To be honest it's a bit of both... the work-life balanced-blend!! The backbone of what I try to do is to balance the time I spend in work so that I don't slip back into my bad workaholic habits.  I make a conscious effort to disconnect from work at the weekends. If I have an evening or late night call overseas I'll sleep in the next morning, or take some downtime at some other time. But there are times when I have to let the work and private stuff blend and then I appreciate the flexibility my firm gives me to be able to do that. It's give and take. It works.

Oh, and I drink plenty of coffee.  Did I mention I like coffee? ;)

A legacy of disruptive innovation

In Australia last month, I picked up a copy of the magazine "The Monthly." I confess I'd never heard of it before, but one article in particular caught my eye: Tablet or Toilet?. In the essay, historian James Boyce makes the case that maybe the current revolutions based on computer technology aren't as transformative as we think, but more mundane inventions (e.g. the toilet!) have had a much bigger impact on human life over the past 150 years. I recommend you read his article. It's pretty compelling!

In my world of civil and environmental engineering design there is a lot going on now with new ideas, tools and automation to make our designs quicker, cheaper and hopefully better. I thought it would be fun to think about some of the innovations that have shaped engineering over the past 150 years.  I'm not an expert on engineering history, so I'll be leaning heavily on my old buddies Google and Wikipedia for help (hey, maybe I should use the Encyclopedia Britannica for nostalia!). Here goes...

Surveying

OK, so I thought I'd look back in history and find that the theodolite - mainstay of surveyors throughout the 20th Century - would have been a relatively new invention, but according to Wikipedia it was invented by a fella called Leonard Digges in the 1500's!  Now according to Encyclopedia Britannica their use for surveying didn't really take off until the invention of log tables in 1620, but what the heck! I guess these disruptive inventions are WAY older than I thought. Maybe it's time for a new disrupter...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) aka "drones" are in the news a lot these days. In my own firm, we actually have a group focused on inspections using drones. Pretty cool stuff. Their application for surveying is a no-brainer.  They can produce accurate surveys in a fraction of the time.  Here's one example.

The other cool innovation is LIDAR/laser scanning which enables existing structures to be captured in digital format and translated straight into models and drawings. Now couple this with UAVs and we're in Sci-Fi land already!

Drawings

Aha, now this time I am in the 150-year window.  Back in the 19th Century the advent of blueprints enabled engineers and architects to make copies of drawings more easily and with greater accuracy. To make these drawings, though, required massive teams of draftsmen in their drawing offices.

Fast forward to the end of the 20th Century and Computer Aided Design (CAD) emerges on the scene to make the production and reproduction of drawings simpler (bye-bye drawing office, hello CAD-Tech).  The next step was to produce 3-D "models" instead of simple drawings, from which drawings and other information can be pulled.

Finally, we can now link these models to all sorts of engineering, costing and other design information in "Building Information Modeling" (BIM). Bippty-boppity, BIM! One model to rule them all!

Process Design

And now to my fun area of design: selecting and sizing wastewater treatment processes.  Wastewater treatment technologies are roughly 150 years old, so it's interesting to think about how process design has changed over the years. Even up until recently, hand-calculations to size major process units were not uncommon.  Certainly spreadsheets enabled these calculations to be done more efficiently and effectively through the 80's and 90's.  There are many examples and even books written on the topic!

One of the major limitations of spreadsheet calculations for poop plants (sorry, I mean water resource recovery facilities - tough to break old habits), is that treatment facilities are quite dynamic, with fluctuations in flows and waste constituents over daily, weekly and seasonal patterns.  It's tough to do spreadsheet calculations on dynamic systems.

New kid on the block: http://www.dynamita.com/the-sumo/

A major breakthrough in the tools used to design these dynamic facilities is process simulation.  I could go on for pages and pages about process simulators because they're one of my specialties.  Instead, maybe I should put in a plug for one or other of the books I helped to pull together on the topic (no royalties for me though, bah!). From innovative tools in the 1990's process simulators such as GPS-X,  BioWin and SIMBA have now become the mainstay for all our design work.

Future Disruption

OK, no self-respecting blog on innovation and disruption can resist taking a wild stab in the dark on future trends, so here goes!

Big data?  Hmm, not sure: we have a lot of bad data.  Analytics? For design...not really.  Artificial intelligence?  Ooh, now you're talking. So, starting from a UAV scanning an area, or existing treatment plant, to producing a BIM model seems like a pretty short couple of steps. The pieces and parts are there already; we just need the smarts and rules to link them up.  But wait, we need super-smart process engineers to run the simulations, right?  For now, yes.  But even this piece can be automated (we're not as smart as we seem). To see the future, check out this cool tool developed by Organica. My understanding is that it's not fully automated yet, but not far off.  The day may come when I can hang up my slide rule, burn my log tables and let robo-engineer do all the hard work!

Patent paralysis

OK, so I may have a different perspective on patents than others. This is due largely to the fact that a couple of the professionals that had the most influence on my growth as a poop engineer had a less than positive view of patents.  To protect the innocent and to avoid accusations of slander I’m not going to name names, but one individual had his idea stolen by a large firm who then patented it and tried to stop him using his own idea. Thankfully it mostly failed and time has healed most of the wounds.  The other individual was an innovator beyond compare and his ethos was to keep developing new ideas and applications to stay ahead of the game. He didn’t have the time or inclination to “waste” money on patents.

At this point I should also give the background that my little world is mostly the design and upgrading of publicly-owned poop plants.

So, with this background, let me set out why I think patents can be a bad thing.

Why I don't like patents...

1. They stifle innovation

The very purpose of a patent is not to enable someone to produce something, but to prevent anyone else from doing it except you in order to have an advantage. If you patent an idea, no-one else is going to do it, and in our little poop-plant world that stifles acceptance and further development. In other realms where you’re mass-producing consumer goods or medicines I can see this is OK and fair, but in my space it’s really tough to get anyone to innovate, so patenting an idea can kill it pretty fast. I don’t think many equipment vendors get this.

2. POTWs can’t specify “one-of-a-kind” technology

Hand-in-hand with stifling innovation, or partly the cause, are the rules that prevent most public utilities from specifying unique technologies. This makes it VERY difficult to do anything new. On the other hand, having just 2 or 3 vendors competing in the same space can be a major boost. I actually spend quite some time comparing technologies and my job is made a whole lot easier if there is more than one of a type.

3. No-one likes lawyers

Now don't get me wrong, there are many fine and upstanding lawyers in the world, many of whom have been good friends of mine over the years. And we definitely need lawyers to help us uphold the law.  BUT in the litigious culture of the Western World (sorry, I mean where the "rule of law" prevails, yawn), as soon as you threaten to bring in lawyers, we all get a bit weird. Engineers in particular get very uneasy around lawyers and their word games.  Heck, we're straightforward thinking, problem solvers. Please don't try to trip us up with what we mean when use certain words or opinions.  I've read a couple of patents and the language in them is awful lawyer-speak, seemingly preventing anyone from doing anything anywhere, ever. 

Overcoming Patent Paralysis

OK, so I've bad-mouthed one of the main mechanisms for encouraging and protecting inventions since the 16th Century, so do I have any suggestions for a better way forward?  I'm not a lawyer (phew, you say), so perhaps I'm not qualified to comment, but here are a few ideas for alternative ways of driving innovation through new ideas and inventions without using patents to stop it...

A. Stay ahead of the game

I mentioned this already, but early in my career I worked for a company that developed some amazing online instrumentation including online respirometry which, to this day, no-one has ever come close to matching.  I didn't appreciate it at the time but the ideas produced in that small firm were way ahead of their time and I believe that they only patented one mechanical item out of all the ideas and innovations they produced.  The ethos of my boss was to just keep ahead of the game. It turns out he's still 20 years ahead of the game!

B. Go open source

This is a radical idea, but one used by Elon Musk.  Don't prevent others from using your ideas, but let them have a go too, then compete to win.  Particularly if your ideas are radical and maybe in a whole new domain of their own.  Opening up your ideas to others will help spur research and more ideas from which you and the others will all benefit. Isn't this how research is supposed to be done? Rather than hiding your ideas or locking them down so no-one else can develop them further, consider opening the black box and learning from your competitors.

C. Copyright, don't patent

Did I mention I'm no lawyer, so I probably can't comment fully on this, but there are protections under law for published materials and ideas that are covered by copyright.  I think there are some weird loopholes in US patent law that allow you to pinch ideas for the 1st year after they're published if you have good lawyers (the experience of my other colleague I mentioned earlier), but still, if you have an idea and publish it, then you have some protections, I think.  Doing this, plus considering the "open source" approach is really what research should be about, I think. But only if you want to encourage innovation!

OK, so equipment vendors and those of you who've patented a gazillion inventions, let me know why I'm off base as usual!