Billy Raseman鈥檚 drinking water optimization research was highlighted in a CU press briefing. 聽Below is an excerpt from the story, but聽!
Since the only guarantee in life is change, William Raseman is using his research to try to prepare water municipalities from being crippled by unforeseen circumstances such as floods, droughts or wildfires.
The second-year civil engineering PhD student is building software programming to assess the impact of climate and environmental change on drinking water decisions.聽Working under Assistant Professor Joseph Kasprzyk, Raseman is learning to use multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to help water municipalities make decisions that will be resilient against future climate change induced challenges.
Or, more simply, he is building computer programs to simulate disasters and then generate possible solutions to them.
鈥淲e can鈥檛 fix everything the right way,鈥� Raseman said of current water infrastructure systems. 鈥淲e have what we have and so we need to make the systems we already have more adaptable to changing conditions.鈥�
This means finding a way to modify the systems already in place to best serve the needs of the present and future. He gave the example of a Fort Collins water treatment plant that recently cut off intake from the river from because of a wildfire nearby. The drastic increase in sediment made the water untreatable for 100 days. Though this plant had access to a reservoir as backup, Raseman questioned possible outcomes if a backup source wasn鈥檛 available.