Dr. Kiranmayi Mangalgiri

Dr. Kiranmayi Mangalgiri, assistant professor in the Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering at Oklahoma State University, is a member of the OK NSF EPSCoR Track-1 RII Award titled Socially Sustainable Solutions for Water, Carbon, and Infrastructure Resilience in Oklahoma. The $20 million research project is a social science-led, multi-disciplinary collaboration among social, physical, biological, engineering, and computational scientists. More than thirty researchers from across the state are working together on the project, which began July 1, 2020.

 

As a water quality engineer, Dr. Mangalgiri's research focuses on water, wastewater, and water reuse. The overall goal of her research group is to study the occurrence, fate, and transport of organic contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in water reuse and resource recovery systems. Increasing population and limited resources have necessitated the recovery of water, nutrients, metals, and energy from waste streams and alternate water sources of marginalized quality (such as wastewater effluent, produced water, stormwater runoff). However, organic CECs including pharmaceuticals, personal care products, flame retardants, herbicides, and pesticides are ubiquitous in waste streams, and the fate of these contaminants in water reuse and resource recovery systems is largely unknown. Priority CECs are toxic, biologically active, endocrine-disrupting, or those that contribute to antibiotic resistance. Furthermore, there is a need for novel treatment strategies that can be incorporated into non-traditional treatment trains in water reuse and resource recovery systems to eliminate the presence of CECs in the final recovered product.

 

Research expertise includes (i) environmental sample analysis and analytical method development for detection of organic contaminants and CECs in environmental media; (ii) the application of fundamental aqueous chemistry, reaction kinetics, and transport theory to predict the fate and transport of CECs; and, (iii) development of mathematical models to enable the extension of bench-scale data to pilot- and full-scale application for real-world problems.

 

Dr. Mangalgiri's work supports the OK NSF EPSCoR research project's Focus Area 3: Variable and Marginal Quality Water Supplies (V-MQW). The V-MQW Supplies focus area addresses issues surrounding Oklahoma’s water demands, which are projected to increase 600,000 acre-feet per year between 2007-2060. Reliable water supplies are needed to provide for these demands while meeting the state’s goal of capping freshwater use to 2010 levels. However, freshwater supplies are declining due to reservoir sedimentation and groundwater overdraft and are increasingly vulnerable to S2S variability. Concurrently, volumes of oil and gas ‘produced water,’ municipal wastewater, and stormwater are increasing with continued oil and gas development and urbanization. Disposal of produced waters has been correlated with seismicity, potentially impacting infrastructure and resulting in energy production curtailment in some regions. The challenge is finding a mix of solutions that allow Oklahoma’s diverse array of MQW to be economically treated for beneficial use to address water scarcity related to changing seasonal to sub-seasonal weather patterns, waste disposal, and infrastructure risk while supporting continued energy production and economic growth.