UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation investigates the dynamic energy-water usage efficiency of civil engineering projects involving the recharge of subsurface groundwater aquifers via the reuse of treated municipal wastewater. For this purpose a three-component integrated assessment model has been developed. The first component uses a cartographic modeling technique known as Weighted Overlay Analysis (WOA) to determine the location and extent of sites that are suitable for the development of groundwater recharge basins given a regional geographic context. The second component uses a novel Genetic Algorithm (GA) to address the multi-objective spatial optimization problem associated with locating corridors for the support infrastructure required to physically transport water from the treatment facility to the recharge site. The third and final component takes data about the anticipated recharge treatment source location, reuse destination location, and proposed infrastructure corridor location and uses them to populate a spatially explicit Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) model capturing all of the process energy consumption associated with the reuse system. Five case studies involving the planning of new basin scale artificial recharge systems within the state of California are presented and discussed.