Course Description
ENV4514C is the water and wastewater treatment design course — the capstone of the environmental engineering sequence, and the one that most directly produces employable engineers. The Statewide Course Numbering System titles it Water/Wastewater Treatment and defines it with unusual brevity: "design of water and wastewater treatment units." The C suffix marks an integrated lecture-and-laboratory course, and the statewide record flags a laboratory component.
⚠ One Florida institution carries this exact number: the University of Florida, which titles it "Water & Wastewater Engineering" and carries it at 4 credits. Because a single institution carries it, this guide hedges deliberately — the statewide definition is authoritative for the subject, but the week-to-week emphasis of one department is not something a statewide guide should assert.
⚠⚠ Three further Florida public universities teach the same subject as ENV4514, without the C and at 3 credits. See the offering notes below; if you are transferring this course, that section is the one that matters, and one of those three uses the number for something noticeably different.
The subject is where the whole environmental sequence converges. Mass balance, reactor theory, chemistry and fluid mechanics all reappear, and the student uses them to size real things: a rapid mix basin, a flocculator, a sedimentation tank, a filter, an activated sludge reactor, a clarifier, a digester. Every municipality in Florida operates these unit processes, and the design criteria are not academic — they are in state rule.
Learning Outcomes
Required Outcomes
- Characterise a raw water or wastewater and determine the treatment objectives from it and from the applicable standards.
- Select an appropriate treatment train for a stated source water and finished water quality requirement.
- Apply reactor theory — batch, plug flow, completely mixed, and reactors in series — to treatment unit design.
- Design coagulation and flocculation: coagulant selection and dose from jar testing, rapid mix, velocity gradient, tapered flocculation.
- Design sedimentation: overflow rate, detention time, weir loading, and the basis of settling theory.
- Design granular media filtration: loading rate, media selection, head loss, backwash requirements.
- Design disinfection: CT concept, chlorine chemistry and breakpoint, chloramines, UV and ozone, and disinfection by-product formation and control.
- Design water softening and describe membrane processes.
- Design preliminary and primary wastewater treatment: screening, grit removal, primary clarification.
- Design activated sludge: solids retention time, food-to-microorganism ratio, mixed liquor concentration, oxygen demand, secondary clarifier solids loading, and sludge recycle.
- Describe attached growth processes — trickling filters, rotating biological contactors, moving bed reactors.
- Design biological nutrient removal for nitrogen and phosphorus — ⚠ central in Florida.
- Design sludge handling: thickening, digestion, dewatering, and disposal or beneficial reuse.
- Apply the hydraulics of a plant: head loss through the train, hydraulic profile, pumping.
- Conduct laboratory or bench-scale work supporting design — jar tests, settling columns, oxygen uptake — and use the results in a design decision.
Optional Outcomes
- Design advanced treatment: membrane filtration, reverse osmosis, advanced oxidation, activated carbon.
- Design for water reuse and reclaimed water distribution — ⚠ a major Florida practice area.
- Address desalination — ⚠ Florida operates the largest seawater desalination plant in the United States.
- Perform process modelling with a simulator such as BioWin or GPS-X.
- Conduct a full plant design project with drawings and a cost estimate.
- Address odour control, corrosion, and operability — the things that determine whether operators can actually run what you designed.
- Address emerging contaminants and PFAS treatment.
Major Topics
Required Topics
- Water quality objectives and standards — the Safe Drinking Water Act, maximum contaminant levels, the Clean Water Act, discharge permits.
- Reactor theory applied to treatment — residence time distribution, short-circuiting, reactors in series.
- Coagulation and flocculation — colloid destabilisation, coagulant chemistry, jar testing, mixing energy.
- Sedimentation — discrete, flocculent, hindered and compression settling; basin design; tube and plate settlers.
- Filtration — granular media, head loss development, backwash, and membrane alternatives.
- Disinfection — kinetics and the CT concept, chlorine chemistry, breakpoint, by-products, UV and ozone.
- Softening and ion exchange — lime-soda and membrane softening.
- Wastewater characteristics and preliminary treatment — screening, grit removal, flow equalisation.
- Biological treatment — microbiology and kinetics, activated sludge and its variants, attached growth, lagoons.
- Secondary clarification — solids flux, sludge settleability, return and waste sludge.
- Nutrient removal — nitrification and denitrification, enhanced biological phosphorus removal, chemical phosphorus removal.
- Solids handling — thickening, aerobic and anaerobic digestion, dewatering, biosolids classification and disposal.
- Plant hydraulics and layout — the hydraulic profile, redundancy, and design for operation and maintenance.
Optional Topics
- Advanced oxidation, activated carbon and membrane processes.
- Water reuse and reclaimed water systems.
- Desalination and concentrate management.
- Process simulation software.
- Small and decentralised systems, including septic systems.
- Odour control and corrosion.
- Energy use and recovery at treatment plants.
- PFAS and emerging contaminants.
Resources & Tools
- ⚠ Water and Wastewater Engineering: Design Principles and Practice by Mackenzie Davis is the standard text for this course and is written as a design manual rather than a survey.
- Metcalf & Eddy, Wastewater Engineering: Treatment and Resource Recovery — ⚠ the reference of the profession. Practising engineers keep it on the desk for a whole career; buying it as a student is a genuinely good investment.
- MWH's Water Treatment: Principles and Design is its counterpart on the drinking water side.
- Ten States Standards (Recommended Standards for Water Works and for Wastewater Facilities) — widely used design criteria, and the source of many of the loading rates students are asked to apply.
- ⚠ In Florida the governing criteria are state rule: Chapter 62-555 F.A.C. for drinking water systems and Chapter 62-600 F.A.C. for domestic wastewater. A design in Florida is checked against these, not against a national textbook default.
- Laboratory: jar test apparatus, settling columns, respirometers, and the analytical suite from the introductory laboratory course.
- Process simulators — BioWin, GPS-X, SUMO — where the course reaches them; these are what consultancies use.
- Professional bodies: the Water Environment Federation and its Florida section (FWEA), and the American Water Works Association and its Florida section (FSAWWA). ⚠ Both run student chapters and job boards, and this is the environmental speciality where that network matters most.
Career Pathways
- Environmental Engineer (SOC 17-2081) — ⚠ and this is the course that most reliably converts into a first job. Water and wastewater design is the steadiest employment in the discipline, because every municipality needs it and the work is not discretionary.
- Civil Engineer (SOC 17-2051) — treatment plants are civil works as much as process plants.
- Water and Wastewater Treatment Plant Operator (SOC 51-8031) — a licensed occupation in Florida in its own right. ⚠ Engineers who understand the operator's job design better plants, and the good ones know it.
- Environmental Compliance and Permitting roles at utilities and regulators.
- Florida employers: every municipal and county utility in the state — Miami-Dade, Tampa Bay Water, JEA in Jacksonville, Orange County Utilities, Hillsborough, Pinellas; the Florida Department of Environmental Protection; and the consultancies that design and permit these plants (Jacobs, CDM Smith, Hazen and Sawyer, Carollo, Black & Veatch, AECOM, Reiss Engineering).
- ⚠ Florida is one of the strongest water markets in the country, for structural reasons. Population growth continues; nutrient discharge limits are tightening because of harmful algal blooms and spring degradation; water reuse is mandated and widespread — Florida reuses more reclaimed water than any other state; and Tampa Bay operates the largest seawater desalination plant in the United States. Nutrient removal and reuse expertise gained here is portable and in demand.
Special Information
Offering Notes — offerings and hours, school by school
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|
| University of Florida | Water & Wastewater Engineering | 4 | not published |
The University of Florida is a State University System institution. One institution carries this exact number, so there is no range to resolve within it — but the comparison with the bare number matters, and it is not a clean one.
⚠ The 75 contact hours at the top of this guide are derived, not published: the Florida convention for an integrated lecture-and-laboratory course, scaled to this course's 4 credits. The three institutions carrying the bare ENV4514 at 3 credits will run lower, around 45 to 60. UF publishes no contact-hour figure. Check the scheduled meeting pattern on your own timetable.
⚠⚠ The bare number ENV4514 is carried by three other universities — at 3 credits, and one of them teaches something broader
| Institution | Number | Its title | Credits |
|---|
| University of Florida | ENV4514C (this course) | Water & Wastewater Engineering | 4 |
| Florida Atlantic University | ENV4514 | Water and Wastewater Treatment Systems | 3 |
| Florida Polytechnic University | ENV4514 | Water and Wastewater Treatment | 3 |
| University of West Florida | ENV4514 | Environmental Engineering Design | 3 |
Three things follow, and they compound.
- Different numbers. ENV4514 and ENV4514C are not the same number, so the statewide transfer guarantee does not run between them — the credit is evaluated instead.
- A credit difference on top of it. Four credits against three. ⚠ In an ABET-accredited curriculum budgeted to the credit, that gap surfaces at the graduation audit. Get it confirmed in writing before the term you need it.
- ⚠⚠ The University of West Florida's title points somewhere broader. "Environmental Engineering Design" reads as a capstone design course spanning the discipline rather than a treatment course specifically. Florida Atlantic and Florida Polytechnic both name treatment explicitly and agree with each other and with the statewide title — so the weight of evidence says this number means treatment, and UWF's use of it is the outlier. If you are at UWF, read the course description rather than this guide's topic list; if you are transferring a UWF course of this number, expect a receiving department to ask what it actually covered.
Position in the curriculum, the FE exam and licensure
A senior-level course and, in most programmes, the environmental capstone or immediately before it. It assumes the introductory course (ENV3001C, ENV3001 or ENV4001), fluid mechanics, and a chemistry sequence; reactor theory and mass balance are used from the first week without review.
Water and wastewater treatment is the largest content area on the NCEES PE Environmental examination and features on both the Environmental and Civil FE examinations. The FE is the first step toward Professional Engineer licensure through the Florida Board of Professional Engineers, which requires four years of qualifying experience before the PE examination.
⚠ Treatment plant designs are sealed by a licensed engineer and permitted by FDEP, and the plants deliver drinking water to the public. The standard of care is external, documented and enforced, and the consequences of getting it wrong are measured in public health rather than in cost.
Workload
Budget ten to fourteen hours a week — more if the course carries a full plant design project, which concentrates brutally in the final weeks. ⚠ The distinctive difficulty is that design problems are open-ended. There is no single correct answer to "size the clarifier": there is a defensible answer, a set of criteria it satisfies, and a justification. Students who have spent three years solving for a number find that transition harder than any calculation in the course. Trial, check against criteria, revise — and budget for the iterations.
AI Integration
This is a design course with a regulatory spine, which puts it at the intersection of the two things these tools handle worst.
Genuinely useful: explaining a process mechanism — why enhanced biological phosphorus removal needs an anaerobic selector, what sludge bulking is and why it happens; generating practice problems; checking mass balance algebra and unit consistency; explaining an unfamiliar operating parameter; writing spreadsheet routines for solids balances and oxygen demand, which is exactly how practitioners prototype a design; and drafting design report prose.
⚠⚠ Where it fails:
- Design criteria quoted from memory. Overflow rates, filtration loading rates, SRT ranges, CT values — models produce plausible numbers with no source. ⚠ In Florida these come from Chapter 62-555 or 62-600 F.A.C., not from a national textbook default, and a permit reviewer will check them against the rule.
- Superseded standards. Maximum contaminant levels and disinfection by-product rules change; models quote old values confidently.
- Plausible but unbuildable designs. A generated treatment train may be internally consistent and ignore redundancy requirements, hydraulic profile, operator access, or what happens when a unit is taken offline for maintenance. ⚠ Operability is the part a model has no way to assess, and it is what separates a design that works from one that merely calculates.
- Nutrient removal specifically. Florida's limits are frequently stricter than national practice, and a generated design sized to a national standard will not meet a Florida permit.
The professional standard this course installs: every design value is traceable to a criterion, and every criterion to a rule or an accepted standard with an edition. Cite it. That is what a reviewing engineer checks, what FDEP checks, and what an expert witness checks years later. It also catches every failure listed above, and it costs a minute.
⚠ One thing worth saying plainly: a treatment plant that fails does not produce a bad grade. It produces a boil-water notice, or a discharge that closes a beach, or worse. The NSPE Code of Ethics holds public safety paramount, and this is the course where that stops being an abstraction — the designs here are the ones that keep drinking water safe.
Academic integrity: design projects are normally defended in review, which reliably exposes work a student cannot explain. Read your syllabus; instructor policies commonly distinguish drafting from design calculation.