WEFTEC Win: CCEE student team brings home first place
A team of NC State students and recent alumni from the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering won first place in the wastewater category of the Water Environment Federation’s Technical Exhibition and Conference (WEFTEC) Student Design Competition.
This is the first time an NC State team has won a competition at WEFTEC. In previous years, NC State teams have finished second, third and fourth. The team traveled to New Orleans this year for WEFTEC, which took place Oct. 5-9.
Andie Toney, a senior environmental engineering student, said that after the team’s presentation, she and her teammates were “ecstatic” and felt confident they’d nailed it. But as they waited on results, doubt started to creep in.
“We were pretty critical of ourselves,” she said. “I think we were saying, like, we’ll be fine if we get fifth place to seventh place. That’s about the range we were expecting. And so when they called fourth place, we’re like, ‘Oh darn it. We didn’t place.’”
Instead, Toney and her teammates, David Broud and Shannon Roock, won the whole competition and a $2,500 prize.
The group convened in CE 481, the environmental engineering senior design class, in January 2024. All three members ranked their future project because of the opportunity to compete at WEFTEC. Their project, “Rehabilitation and Upgrades of the Triangle Wastewater Treatment Plant,” aimed to improve the longevity and efficiency of the Durham, North Carolina-based facility.
A lot of equipment at the plant was nearing its end of life, and Toney said the team’s initial reaction was to build the plant from scratch. But as she and her teammates broke down the problem into more manageable pieces, they started to come up with solutions.
Toney, Broud and Roock visited the plant multiple times and made trips to the North Cary Wastewater Treatment Plant to assess its recent upgrades. After lengthy conversations with plant superintendents, they developed a plan.
“We proposed upgrades for a lot of the equipment that was failing or end-of-life,” Toney said. “And then the other big component is that we added two new facilities: an equalization basin and diffuse aerators to their treatment trains.”
Over the semester and summer, the team refined its presentation with the help of advisors, including Francis de los Reyes, Glenn E. and Phyllis J. Futrell Distinguished Professor, and Michael Wang, vice president at Hazen and Sawyer. The team first won the in-state competition put on by NC One Water, which gave them the opportunity to compete at WEFTEC.
“A lot of our success, I think, comes from our advisors, just being legends in the water and wastewater world,” Toney said. “They had great insights for us, and they were really there for us every step of the way and getting on Zoom meetings last minute.”
Toney will graduate in December and plans to pursue a master’s degree in environmental engineering. Broud and Roock both graduated in May. Broud is now a transmission and utilities engineer at Freese and Nichols, Inc., and Roock is an engineering designer at McKim & Creed.