Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Unreliable Results of a Commercial Real-Time Water Quality Sensor in Identifying Fecal Contamination of Drinking Water
Published: 2025-09-19
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Low-cost technologies are increasingly being explored and marketed as capable of filling gaps in global water quality monitoring (WQM), especially in resource-limited settings. This study evaluates a commercially available, low-cost triboelectric-based sensor that is marketed for real-time detection of E. coli in drinking and environmental waters. A result of 0 indicates contaminated water, [...]
Minkowski Functionals as Analytical Predictors of Permeability in Porous Microstructures
Published: 2025-09-19
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
Understanding the relationship between microstructure and macroscopic properties in porous media remains crucial for numerous applications in geoscience and engineering. For example, accurate predictability of permeability is essential for optimizing fluid flow processes in applications such as hydrocarbon recovery, groundwater management, and carbon or energy storage. The Kozeny-Carman equation [...]
Tropical cyclone risk to global electricity supply
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Power and Energy, Risk Analysis
To analyse the risks from Tropical Cyclones (TC) to electricity supply, we have combined a large ensemble of TC simulations with a spatial model of power networks and people served, for the entire TC belt globally. The model of electricity power failure, measured in terms of population disrupted, was calibrated against nighttime lights satellite imagery of historic TC events. Use of spatially [...]
A Dynamic Reservoir Modeling Approach to Assess Water Security under Climatic and Anthropogenic Pressures: Application to the Aburrá Valley, Colombia
Published: 2025-09-02
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Water security in Aburrá Valley, Colombia, relies heavily on the Riogrande II and La Fe reservoirs, which face increasing pressures from climate variability, land use change, and rising demand. Although SWAT+ is a powerful hydrological modeling tool, its reservoir module cannot represent dynamic changes in demand, land use, or external water inflow. To address these limitations, we developed [...]
Evaluation of biochar produced from coffee husks as an alternative treatment for wastewater contaminated with agrochemicals in the southwestern region of Antioquia.
Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Excessive use of herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers has enhanced agricultural productivity but has also generated significant environmental impacts and public health risks. Chlorpyrifos, an organophosphorus insecticide, is highly persistent in the environment due to its affinity for organic matter and its ability to be transported via runoff into water bodies, where conventional wastewater [...]
Modeling urban traffic heat flux in the Community Earth System Model: Formulation and validation for two sites
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Vehicular traffic is a major contributor to anthropogenic heat flux (AHF) in urban areas, amplifying urban heat island effects. However, few Earth system models explicitly represent traffic conditions and their associated heat emissions. This study introduces a new urban traffic module into the Community Earth System Model (CESM), enabling interactive simulation of traffic-related heat in urban [...]
Trade-offs Between Discretization Approaches in Urban Stormwater Modeling: Accuracy, Interpretability, and Practical Implications
Published: 2025-08-18
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Stormwater models are important tools for urban drainage design, planning, and analysis, but their performance and interpretation depend heavily on how spatial discretization is handled. This study evaluates the influence of two common discretization strategies – topography- and sewer geometry-based – on hydrological representation and simulation accuracy in the Storm Water Management Model [...]
Participatory assessment of French Reed Beds (FRB) as natural based solution for rural sanitation in arid environments: insights from Ouijjane project in Morocco
Published: 2025-08-16
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Water Resource Management
Rural improved sanitation remains a major challenge to achieving the UN SDG 6 goal. In this regard, this study evaluates, with local stakeholders, an operational rural sanitation project in Ouijjane commune, Morocco, using French Reed Bed (FRB) technology. Data from project documentation, as well as field interviews and focus group discussions, were used to carry out a participatory evaluation. [...]
Technological Adaptation Outpaces Climate Impacts on Aviation: Evidence from Three Decades of Warming
Published: 2025-08-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Climate impact assessments frequently prioritize projections over empirical validation of operational outcomes. We introduce and apply a generalizable empirical validation framework that (i) separates operational encounters from safety outcomes and (ii) tests climate → operations linkages via physical mechanism validation with explicit detectability bounds. Using 33 years (1991–2023) of U.S. [...]
Geomodelling of multi-scenario non-stationary reservoirs with enhanced GANSim
Published: 2025-08-05
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Hydrology, Mining Engineering, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Reservoir geomodelling is critical for groundwater management, CO₂ storage, geothermal exploitation, and hydrocarbon exploration, yet traditional geostatistical methods like multiple-point statistics (MPS) struggle with simulating complex geological patterns. GANSim, a Generative Adversarial Networks-based geomodelling method, has proven effective for single-scenario stationary reservoirs, but [...]
Regional Responses to Oceanic Variability Constrain Global Drought Synchrony
Published: 2025-07-11
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Synchronized droughts threaten global food security, with concerns about increased frequency and duration under climate change. However, their long-term evolution and physical limits remain unknown. We analyze 61 drought networks over 120 years (1901–2020) of scPDSI data, employing a suite of network synchronization measures and empirical orthogonal functions to unravel the physical drivers and [...]
Conservation is Coherence: Introducing the Negawatt Philosophy of Lawful Design
Published: 2025-07-10
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physics, Other Planetary Sciences, Sustainability, Systems Biology
This paper articulates the Negawatt Philosophy, reframing conservation not as omission or moral restraint, but as the structural intelligence that sustains life and preserves biospheric coherence. Modern economies valorise extraction and combustion while treating conservation as invisible absence. Yet thermodynamics reveals life as negentropy—an ordering that defies the drift into entropy’s [...]
HydroBlox: AI-Assisted Visual Programming Framework for Enhanced Scientific Reproducibility in Hydrology
Published: 2025-06-20
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computational Engineering, Education, Environmental Engineering, Hydraulic Engineering, Science and Mathematics Education
Scientific workflow reproducibility for hydrological and environmental analyses remains a challenge due to the heterogeneity of data sources, analysis protocols, and evolving visualization needs. This study introduces HydroBlox, a client-side browser-based framework that supports the creation, execution, and export of hydrological workflows using a visual programming interface. The platform [...]
Quantifying lead (Pb) leaching from galvanized handpump spouts, leaded brass taps, and stainless-steel alternatives using the NSF 61 test protocol: Implications for safe rural water supply
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Lead (Pb) is a neurotoxin with no known safe level of exposure. Widespread lead contamination has been found in rural groundwater-supplied drinking water systems in low- and middle-income countries, potentially from corrosion of lead-containing materials such as galvanized steel and brass. National Sanitation Foundation (NSF) 61 is an international standard for certifying the safety of water [...]
Lead (Pb) contamination in drinking water in low- and middle-income countries: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Lead (Pb) in drinking water causes organ damage, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and lifelong neurological and developmental impairment, disproportionately harming infants and developing fetuses. However, evidence on lead in drinking water in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is limited and lacks robust synthesis, impeding action. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of [...]