Stormwater management

• Urban hydrology
• Hydrological and hydraulic models
• Flood Risk analysis and management
• Risk and vulnerability assessment of climate change and urbanization impacts
• Sustainable Blue-Green solutions and reuse of water resources: LIDs, BGs, Rainwater Harvesting (RWH), natural based solutions (NBSs)

Our leading scientist: Linmei Nie

Team members: PhD candidate Mihn Tuan Bui

Water environment technology and ecosystem services

• Water quality and pollution control
• Eco-hydrology and Eco-hydraulics
• Assessment of river habitats
• Rehabilitation and restoration of urban water systems
• River basin management
• Cultural environment and sustainability

Leading scientist: Professor Dr. Jinmei LU

Team members: Dr. Tong Chang.

Hydropower and Renewable energy

• Hydrological modelling
• Hydropower and climate
• Hydropower and Environment Impact Assessment (EIA)
• Hydropower as a “green battery” for balancing the intermittent renewable energy (such as wind, solar power).
• Advanced Hydro turbine design
• Products driven by Solar energy

Leading expert: Professor Ånund Killingtveit.

Team members: Dr. Pingju Li.  Dr. Linmei Nie

Rehabilitation and repairing concrete hydraulic structure failures

• SK Polyurea materials
• Laboratory testing
• Rehabilitation and repairing of hydraulic and hydropower and other type of concrete structures.
• Application and demonstration projects.

Leading expert: Prof. Zhiheng Sun;

 

Data, digitalization, hydrological and hydraulic modelling

• Data acquisition, assimilation, and management
• Big data, machine learning and advanced analysis
• Hydrological and hydraulic modelling
• Water disaster modelling and risk assessment
• Risk assessment
• GIS

Leading expert: Dr. Pingju Li

Team members: Dr. Linmei Nie, Dr. Minh Tuan Bui, Dr. Linus Zhang

SmartWater4Future is a research project under the EU’s Water4All 2022 Joint Transnational Call: Management of water resources: resilience, adaptation & mitigation to hydroclimatic extreme events & management tools.

We aim to develop new and improved tools for risk assessment, integrated modelling of flooding from urban drainage systems coupled with river catchment and recipients (rivers, lakes, wetland and sea) under hydroclimatic extremes, supported by historical data and on-site monitoring instant data especially for Nordic and arctic areas. Sustainable Life Cycle Assessment, providing holistic decision support toolkit to help water utilities to manage the water and wastewater systems for safe distribution, collect and treatment of water and wastewater from inlet to recipient in regard to the water quantity and quality under the extreme stressors such as intense precipitation and huge temperature variations. Scientific and/or technological aims: To establish an extensive database with historical data, predicted meteorological data of future scenarios, and high-resolution data for regional and global climate change and definition of hydroclimatic extreme events. Thus improving resilience and adaptation capacity of water infrastructure (e.g., industrial water facilities, urban networks, wastewater treatment facilities, stormwater management systems and rural systems) to hydroclimatic extreme events. Development of methodology for quantification of ecosystem services of wetlands with respect to hydrological functions, which includes hydrological modeling of water regime provided for normal and extreme events (floods and droughts), and future climate projection scenarios with ecosystem services. The project is based two field sites in Sweden and two field sites in Norway, implemented by 7 Work Packages (WPs).

Waste2Fresh is bringing exciting and ground-breaking innovative solutions specifically to the textile manufacturing process to target the ever-growing sustainability concerns within the industry.

Horizon 2020 project, Waste2Fresh addresses freshwater resource scarcity and industrial water pollution by bringing together the leading textile manufacturing companies and relevant SMEs across Europe, as well as supporting Industry Innovation and Research and Technology Organisations.

The Waste2Fresh system will integrate novel catalytic degradation approaches with highly selective separation and extraction techniques to deliver a closed loop system that assures near-zero discharge, reduce current use of freshwater resources and increase the recovery of water, energy and other resources, including organics, salts and heavy metals. The system will therefore increase resource and water efficiency and ultimately lead to considerable environmental gains weighted against EU and global environmental footprints.

We have optimized the synthesis of the nanofique catalytic bionanomaterial and developed a prototype batch reactor. Initially, the synthesis of the nanofique comprised a series of 5 stages between the conditioning of the fibers and subsequent immobilization of the iron oxide nanoparticles to obtain the final material. In order to reduce time and cost in the preparation of the nanofique, crucial parameters were evaluated at each stage of the synthesis. Once all the parameters were evaluated in detail, the number of stages to obtain the nanofique was reduced to 3 stages making unnecessary the conditioning of the fibers (brushing and cleaning) and discarding the use of hydrochloric acid in the alkalinization stage. In addition, the fiber load for the synthesis of nanofique was increased from 10% to 12.5%, and discarding the final drying process of the nanofique fibers allowed its use in a direct manner. The new nanomaterial was characterized by spectroscopic techniques such as SEM, EDX, XRF, UV-VIS, and XRD. The optimized nanofique was able to remove up to 90% of color from an indigo carmine solution at a concentration of up to 500 ppm in approximately 2 minutes. Furthermore, reusability testing in an indigo carmine simulated solution demonstrated that the new material can degrade the dye for up to 20 cycles without losing nanofique catalytic properties. It is worth noting that this new methodology was applied to obtain 1 kg of nanofique at a laboratory scale using commercial rather than analytical grade reagents reducing costs. color removal in a test solution of indigo carmine was not affected by the up-scaling of the synthesis or the use of commercial-grade reagents.

Once the synthesis and color removal parameters were optimized, a prototype of a batch reactor was designed based on the deliverable D4.2. The design contemplated the incorporation in the reactor of a perforated grid-type basket where the nanofique is loaded so that it is in continuous contact with the dye solution. the design also contemplated the inclusion of an inlet and an outlet valve to simulate the entrance of the textile wastewater into the reactor and the subsequent exit of the treated water. Successful color removal tests were performed on 100 ppm indigo carmine solutions at 1 L scale in the reactor using aeration instead of mechanical agitation. A series of experiments were conducted to find the optimal conditions for the batch prototype to be operational. Once optimized, the technical team tested the process on a prototype reactor (5 L/h) located at the Konya Technical University. The operating conditions for color removal with Nanofique were optimized using aqueous solutions of indigo carmine as model wastewater. However, for the actual testing of the prototype, real wastewater samples from the textile industry supplied by ERAK (Denim Manufacturing and Development Center, Turkey) were used following the optimal operating conditions of the experimental design.

A new synthetic procedure was validated to obtain nanofique in fewer steps and with better performance than traditional synthesis. Furthermore, this new method was applied in the scale-up synthesis of nanofique up to 1 Kg.

Critical variables such as temperature, hydrogen peroxide concentration, and nanofique loading were found to be the most important parameters for the color removal capability of the nanofique system according to the experimental results carried out at a laboratory scale as well as on a small pilot scale.

Color removal of real textile wastewater samples from the ERAK industry was performed successfully in a small pilot reactor at Konya Technical University removing up to 90% of the color in a 30 L wastewater volume scale.

Key costs for obtaining nanofique material were analyzed. It was found that it is possible to synthesize nanofique with low-cost commercial grade reagents without losing catalytic performance. Also, synthetic steps were eliminated as it was shown that they do not affect the material obtaining and catalytic activity.

A rainwater harvesting unit is developed and installed in ERAK (Fig. 1 and 2 below). It consists of a 5 m3 rainwater tank, an inlet screen control, first-flush, inflow and outflow water valves, water pipes, pumping facility, a sand filter, overflow discharge system, and sensors to monitor the important water quality indicators, such as conductivity, TSS and pH. A daily-based hybrid real-time rainwater harvesting system (HRWHS) model was developed to assess the performance of the RWH unit.