B-WaterSmart

What is a Water-Smart Society?

The European research project B-WaterSmart accelerates the transformation to water-smart economies and societies in coastal Europe and beyond. Achieving this goal requires ‘water-smartness’ and ‘systemic innovation’. These two concepts are often asked for, but not yet achieved on a broad scale. With regard to ‘water-smartness’ this is because, although some definitions of a ‘water-smart society and economy’ have been proposed, the concept is rather new and has not been much elaborated in water governance research, nor among practitioners. Therefore, there are no harmonized/established approaches on how to assess the ‘water-smartness’ status or gain of a measure, system, or society. The B-WaterSmart project now has developed a definition of ‘water-smart society’.

ULTIMATE

Digital enablers for discovering and cataloguing Industrial Symbiosis

In the era of the consolidation of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, the interrelation between industrial processes is necessary to create a circular economy framework to make efficient the use of the resources. This newer methodology will benefit the industries by reducing water consumption or reducing CO2 emissions to mention some examples.

Under the application and discovery of new industrial symbiosis pathways, contextual data about the process is crucial to interrelate the nexus variables. Data interoperability, standardization and sharing collected under historical or real-time will permit to discovered hindered process and industries interrelations.

Inside the Ultimate project, one of the main objectives is to create economic value and increase sustainability by valorizing resources within the water cycle. In this regards, ULTIMATE support physical innovations with a digital and data-driven toolbox for increasing the understanding and discovering industrial symbiosis opportunities.

The project will elaborate on a common semantic model to interrelate industrial and process-level data to empower artificial intelligence algorithms. On top of that, the interrelation between the variables will permit to distil potential process interrelations as a result of reason over the information. This knowledge-graph will be empowered by previous work performed in the nexus variables understanding at different time and spatial scales.

DigitalWater.City

From the digital to the real: Digital Twins

Abstract: A digital twin is not like a virtual copy of a sibling. Not unless you keep those around to run tests you would prefer not to do on yourself. Rather, this technology helps industries virtually testing their innovations and to simulate the effects of different scenarios, without having to experience it in real life. In water sector, Digital Twins helps water and wastewater utilities to operate more efficiently and cost-effectively, supporting decision making and helping unlock the maximum potential of infrastructure and human resources.

> Read the full article here

Hydrousa

Nature-based solutions implemented to combat water scarcity; an award-winning concept

HYDROUSA goes beyond the current water management practices, adopting regenerative nature-based and biomimicry solutions characterised by low energy and carbon footprint to recover water and other valuable resources. The HYDROUSA concept is materialized by implementing 13 innovations in 3 islands (Mykonos, Tinos, and Lesbos) at six demonstration sites.

HYDROUSA team works intensively in order to develop, integrate, test and validate these solutions, while the local stakeholders are continuously involved, impacting on the design procedure.

Now, we step into the phase of evaluation where the team can bear the fruits of their hard work. As all the demonstration sites are fully operational, the first results show that we can effectively deal with the water demand side through the utilization of non-conventional water resources in agriculture and for domestic use. Specifically, domestic wastewater is treated through anaerobic processes and constructed wetlands, producing reclaimed water that complies with the requirements for unrestricted agricultural irrigation. The recycling of reclaimed water is realized by the irrigation of a 1 ha agroforestry system. In addition, water sources such as rainwater, stormwater and vapour water are valorised as different treatment systems are applied to harvest and store these sources. The analysis confirmed the high quality of recovered water satisfying the needs for the irrigation of different cultivations. In addition, we have achieved the first crop harvest from the cultivations within HYDROUSA.