Within the past few months, Dr. Xiong (Bill) Yu, Opal J. and Richard A Vanderhoof, Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, received an Ohio Sea Grant Award. This project was among five others awarded in the Ohio Sea Grant’s 2026 to 2028 Research Program, which totaled to $1.2 million to be distributed over the following two years. The funding was granted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Ohio State University.

Yu’s research, “AI-Empowered Smart Sewer Systems for Stormwater Overflow Reduction in the Lake Erie Watershed,” stems from his longheld interest in multi-physics processes underground and intelligent infrastructure.

“Our research essentially aims at how we effectively reduce or emulate overflow in the water system, like stormwater or sewer,” Yu said.

The problem is especially important for cities like Cleveland that use combined sewer systems, where stormwater and wastewater flow through the same pipes. During heavy rain, these systems can exceed their capacity and overflow onto streets and into homes, creating health and safety concerns for residents.

According to Yu, cities currently rely on two main approaches to reduce overflow: gray and green infrastructure. Gray infrastructure increases the capacity of existing systems, while green infrastructure uses natural features such as vegetation and soil to manage and filter stormwater.

“If gray infrastructure costs maybe $1 to reduce given amounts of stormwater overflow, green infrastructure [costs] may be 40 cents,” Yu said. “It’s more cost effective, but again, it has limits.”

Yu’s research project involves neither gray nor green infrastructure, but a new type: smart infrastructure. This type of infrastructure is a lot cheaper than the other two types, with a much higher capacity for work. It uses rainfall forecasting and automated controls to monitor and manage sewer systems.

“Overall, smart infrastructure is a cost-effective way to reduce overflow, but at the same time, it requires the system to have a forecast capability and a bit of control,” Yu said. “That’s the intelligence part.”

Yu hopes that with this new technology, cities can have faster and more reliable ways to minimize stormwater overflow and monitor the systems currently in use. In order to track and monitor the status of stormwater in reserves today, there must be sensors at each location that researchers want to track. However, with the smart technology, individual locations combine into clusters that can be tracked from one central location or node called a ‘centroid.’

“All the nodes have a hydraulic equation, and the links make a physical equation,” Yu said. “Only one is the condition at these 10 nodes, but we can estimate the water flow at any any location. That’s the goal. That’s effective monitoring.”

In the end, Yu’s goal is to predict and prevent failures or problems in existing infrastructure before they occur. By the end of 2028, Yu and his team hope to use their research to advise their partners, including the City of Rocky River Wastewater Plant, Greater Cincinnati Metropolitan Sewer District and Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

“We should be able to work with our partners to generate assessments of their systems and provide recommendations,” Yu said. “I cannot guarantee they can be implemented, but theoretically, we can do a lot of scenario analysis to provide recommendations for their planning.”