UC Davis

An analysis of potable water main failures, which are responsible for water loss, are detrimental to public health, greatly inconvenience many people and businesses, and increase operational costs for water utilities, is presented in Chapter 1. Specifically, self-excitation and seasonality in main breaks for a large water utility in Northern California are examined and inference results for a wide range of covariates are included. A demonstration of how leak detection and repair and pressure management programs, which are typically operated separately, can be jointly optimized using hydraulic and economic modeling is presented in Chapter 2. An analysis of the potential for photosynthetic oxygen production by microalgal-bacterial aggregates is given in Chapter 3 while the origins and primary challenges of microalgal-bacterial aggregates are outlined in Chapter 4.