On June 11, the annual ICT4Water Cluster meeting will take place in Brussels. The meeting is aligned with WSSTP Water Innovation Europe (WIE) 2019 which is scheduled for the 12-13 of June in Brussels.

The cluster’s annual event is a good opportunity for the ICT4Water community to get together, reflect on the cluster’s mission and collaboratively work on the Action Plan, receive the steering advice from Commission policy makers and stakeholders and lastly welcome the new projects. It is the first time that this event will take place in EASME since the hand-over from DG CNECT in 2018. Cluster members will receive an invitation to join this meeting shortly.

12 April 2019 in Pisa, Italy

Giving power to your city – the POWER Follower City Conference

POWER Follower Cities and other interested municipalities are expected to attend the conference, which want to enable their inhabitants to become more involved in environmental and, in particular, water issues. The POWER project shows that the use of the POWER Digital Social Platform (DSP) can be an essential element of an innovative approach to civic engagement on local level. The DSP encourages the sharing of knowledge and experiences on climate change and water issues (scarcity, safety, quality, consumption) between citizens, public bodies, companies and local authorities in Europe and worldwide.

For further information, please contact luciana.ferrari@cubitlab.com or go to the conference website

LOTUS is officially launched

LOTUS kick-off launched a four-year cooperative project on the monitoring of water quality. It took place on February 15th and 16th in Delhi and Mumbai and gathered 30 participants from EU and India.

LOTUS expected outcome is a three-fold ICT-based water quality solution which is: firstly, a multi-contaminant, real-time and autonomous sensor, relevant to various types of Indian context and water sources, second, a water management solution analysing the data from the sensors thanks to ICT platforms, and, least, but not last, social innovations to engage stakeholders all along the project.

The kick-off meeting also marked the start of the building of LOTUS use cases, in which the sensors and ICT solutions will be deployed. Scenarios being investigated are water networks, groundwater, irrigation, algae-based waste water treatment and water distribution via tankers.
Users of the technology (water distribution companies) and their end-users (inhabitants and farmers) are both involved in the co-creation of the technology. Use cases will also work as pilots for the pre-commercialisation of LOTUS prototypes, showcasing how our solutions meet the end user needs.
This promising launch puts LOTUS on good track to address efficiently its part of the challenges India faces regarding to the provision of drinking water, waste-water treatment and management of water systems.

INTEGROIL presents first results TUPRAS Izmit refinery pilot

The H2020 INTEGROIL project is conceived to develop and demonstrate a solution to increase water reuse in the oil and gas sector, one of the eight industrial sectors with the highest water consumption. In this way, by reducing fresh water dependence the project contributes to improve the sustainability of this industrial sector.

Within the project, demonstration in upstream and downstream scenarios were foreseen. After the upstream demonstration period that ended in August 2018, INTEGROIL plant was shipped to Turkey and commissioned successfully in TUPRAS Izmit refinery (Figure 1). From October 2018 the INTEGROIL pilot plant is continuously treating refinery wastewater and operated by the refinery own personnel.

The preliminary results obtained so far are the following:
• 95% of turbidity removal by the dissolved air flotation (DAF) process
• Up to 93% of COD removal and 90% of BOD removal by the membrane bioreactor (MBR) process.
• Up to 90% total carbon (TC) removal by the catalytic wet air oxidation (CWAO).
• 97.49% normalized salt rejection by the reverse osmosis (RO) process.

Although the results are highly encouraging, we expect to improve them in the next two months, thanks to the advantages provided by the developed Decision Support System (DSS) that assists in plant operation. In this regard, the DSS has been adapted to the downstream scenario (i.e. the MBR unitary process has been added) and has been under operation. This has enabled, on one hand, assessing the suitability of the DSS in another scenario, and on the other, obtaining data on the performance of each process when dealing with refinery wastewater. The data compiled is currently being used to forecast each unitary system performance, by means of big data and machine learning tools. This will enable further tuning the algorithm capable of selecting the optimal treatment scheme (based on the incoming water quality and the reclaimed water final use, with minimal costs), as well as facilitating the optimisation of each process by identifying those variables with greater influence.

For further information, please visit: https://integroil.eu/author/in...