Hay and straw bales can be stacked up like giant insulating bricks to form load-bearing walls for a wide variety of structures. The technique could provide home builders with inexpensive, energy efficient, long-lasting, fire-resistant, easily built, comfortable houses from a natural resource yearly renewable and locally available. Unfortunately, the lack of knowledge regarding the structural properties of the bales and the wall systems incorporating them presents a major barrier to straw-bale construction. Without the quantitative information that standard engineering testing would provide, the wider use of bale construction will continue to be severely inhibited. This thesis examines the basic mechanical properties of individual straw bales (stress-strain behavior, ultimate strength, Poisson's ratio, etc ...), and prototype wall systems (vertical strength, in-plane lateral strength, out-of-plane lateral strength, deflection, creep, etc ...). The results of the tests on the individual bales as well as the wall systems are used to develop guidelines and equations for the design of straw-bale structures.

The Central Arizona Project (CAP), exposed to nutrient deposition and abundant sunlight, will have seasonal odor problems derived from algal metabolism. Two methods of odor-removal were investigated, and geosmin and 2-methylisoborneol odor-removals, from both odor-free and CAP waters, were achieved using either adsorptive or oxidative techniques. Adsorptive odor-removal was effective from a threshold odor number (TON) of 20 to a TON of 1 with the use of powdered activated carbon. Oxidative odor-removal was also effectively possible using odor-free water, from a TON of 100 to a TON of 1 either with the use of UV lightcatalyzed hydrogen peroxide addition or with the simultaneous use of ozone and hydrogen peroxide. Removal of odors produced by the lysis of the alga Anacvstis nidulans in CAP waters was possible using uncatalyzed ozonation from a TON of 40 to 1 but was not effectively achieved using activated carbon adsorption.