Associate Professor Liu Ye

Associate Professor

School of Chemical Engineering
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
l.ye@uq.edu.au
+61 7 336 54152

Overview

Dr Liu Ye is an Associate Professor at The University of Queensland in the School of Chemical Engineering. Her research focuses on sustainable and cost-effective water and wastewater treatment, including on-line process control, novel technology development, resource recovery and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (monitoring, modeling, and mitigation of N2O) from biological wastewater treatment processes. She has an established leadership in the research field of understanding and mitigating fugitive GHG emissions from urban wastewater systems.She has more than 120 publications, over 70 fully refereed journal papers (with over 3400 citation and an h-index of 32 (Google Scholar, June 08, 2021)), and is a co-inventor of four patents. A/Prof Ye has been awarded over $6M competitive research funding - including four Discovery Projects, Linkage projects, and the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellowship from Australian Research Council - along with several other industry-funded projects. She has a broad research collaboration within academia and industry (e.g. Melbourne Water Corporation, South Australia Water Corporation, Western Water Corporation, Water Utilities, Icon Water etc) in the past 10 years. Liu’s research is having a substantive impact in gaining a deeper scientific understanding of the fundamental biological N2O production pathway during wastewater treatment. The research outcome not only offers a long-term cost-effective solution for water utilities to reduce emissions but also informs the development of new policy such as 2019 IPCC Guidelines for National and International Greenhouse Gas Inventories. Liu also received more than eight scientific awards (including Research Innovation Award from Australia Water Association, UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award, etc.), and the EAIT faculty teaching excellence award. She is an elected management committee member of the (IWA) Specialist Group on Instrumentation, Control, and Automation (ICA). She is also a member of the Australia Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) and Engineers Australia (EA).

Research:

Liu’s research includes greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and mitigation from biological wastewater treatment processes; sludge minimization and biogas production enhancement by using free nitrous acid (FNA) based technology; advanced biological nutrient removal (BNR) technology development; on-line process control and optimisation and resource recovery from wastes.

Teaching and Learning:

CHEE4060: Process Control Systems (Coordinator and Lecturer);

CHEE2501: Environmental Systems Engineering I: Processes (Lecturer);

CHEE4012: Industrial Wastewater & Solid Waste Management (Lecturer);

CHEE4007/4027 Thesis project;

Research Impacts

A/Prof Liu Ye's research is having a substantive impact in gaining a deeper scientific understanding of biological nutrient removal and recovery during wastewater treatment and outputs from her research are used by industry to recover nutrients from wastewater and reduce greenhouse gas emission and activate sludge production during wastewater treatment, which directly benefits the Australia water utilities and the living environment-:

  • Leader and one of the key drivers to the development of N2O research at UQ . As the project manager and co-leader of the N2O research group at AWMC, Liu works closely with Australia water utilities and have built strong collaborations with several industry partners (Western Australia Water Corporation, Melbourne Water Corporation, and South Australian Water Corporation).
  • Developed the first systematic approach to quantify the N2O emissions from wastewater system with surface aerators. It was successfully applied to estimate the N2O emission factor for a well-mixed full-scale oxidation ditch wastewater treatment plant in Perth.
  • Her ground-breaking research has led to substantial development and commercialisation of the free nitrous acid (FNA) technology. Her research revealed, for the first time, FNA at a low concentration can completely suppress bacterial growth. This research, together with another research result, underpinned the application of FNA as a green chemical to control biofilm growth on sewers and to reduce the sludge production during urban wastewater treatment.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor of Engineering (Environmental Engineering, Zhengzhou University
  • PhD in Environmental Engineering, Beijing University of Technology

Publications

View all Publications

Supervision

View all Supervision

Publications

Book

Book Chapter

  • Nopens, Ingmar, Porro, Jose and Ye, Liu (2022). Perspectives on fugitive GHGs reduction from urban wastewater systems. Quantification and modelling of fugitive greenhouse gas emissions from urban water systems. (pp. 245-257) edited by Liu Ye, Jose Porro and Ingmar Nopens. London, United Kingdom: IWA Publishing. doi: 10.2166/9781789060461_0245

  • Ye, Liu and Porro, Jose (2022). Introduction. Quantification and modelling of fugitive greenhouse gas emissions from urban water systems. (pp. 1-9) edited by Liu Ye, Jose Porro and Ingmar Nopens. London, United Kingdom: IWA Publishing. doi: 10.2166/9781789060461_0001

Journal Article

Conference Publication

Grants (Administered at UQ)

PhD and MPhil Supervision

Note for students: Associate Professor Liu Ye is not currently available to take on new students.

Current Supervision

Completed Supervision