Water & Wastewater Treatment

www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | APRIL 2016 | 29 In the know Research Notes: disruptive innovations How will water be delivered to our taps in 2065? The TWENTY65 consortium of six universities, led by the University of Sheffield, recently won £3.9M in funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to investigate how disruptive innovations could address the 'grand challenges' of water over the next fi y years. Here, the project's lead researchers explain what the project hopes to achieve Prof. Joby boxall UNIvERsITY of SHEffiEld T he current approach of centralised treatment and distribution of drinking water has made significant advances in protecting public health and fundamentally changing the way people live. However, the delivery of high quality drinking water to every home and building has come at a cost in terms of energy, capital, and impact on the environment. Moving into the future, population increase, ageing infrastructure, and the need to better protect the natural environment all in the context of uncertain climate change will drive our current systems beyond breaking point. Given this situation, a grand challenge emerges: how can we tailor water systems to deliver positive impact on health, the environment, the economy, and society over the next 50 years? The TWENTY65 consortium, which includes the Universities of Sheffield, Exeter, Imperial College, Manchester, Newcastle, and Reading is tackling this grand challenge through research and collaboration across the water sector. Combinations of disruptive innovations are needed to change the current water paradigm to create more flexible and adaptive systems. The application of traditional technology-based solutions alone is not the way forward; there is no universal single innovation that, on its own, can address the interconnected and interacting pressures. Thus a suite of solutions will be required for each individual location, or catchment, or city, or neighbourhood. Our research into such solutions will focus on the developed world first, but will have substantive potential for the rapidly developing and developing worlds. Our research will identify and develop disruptive innovations that can impact across the water cycle as well as to understand how to integrate these and other innovations, in a future context, to evaluate and optimise the performance of each suite of solutions. TWENTY65 comprises a variety of research themes linked and supported by a central water innovation hub. Fundamental science and engineering research is core to each theme, with significant impact and benefit resulting from deep and disruptive questioning around the current water management paradigm. Consider the case of an urban area with dense population. A large investment in infrastructure has been made over the past century and pipe networks will likely still represent the best way to deliver mass quantities of water. But to extract the best performance from these systems, we will need pervasive sensors to understand the location, condition and performance of this critical infrastructure. This data could be obtained by robotic autonomous systems, which is one of the research themes in TWENTY65, such that human intervention in buried infrastructure is eliminated in the future. Research to be carried out to help reach this goal includes technical specifications and computer simulations for performance of future robotic devices, consultation with robotics manufacturers to jointly explore the potential market, and developing prototype devices. If our water systems are well- understood thanks to robotic autonomous devices, there may be the ability to add value to the networks by using them for distributed energy storage. The energy sector is increasingly in need of energy storage to balance renewable energy sources across their distribution grids. TWENTY65 will research the potential for using pumped water in combination with heat recovery and other energy generation technologies, at various scales, to serve as energy Dr Vanessa sPeigHt UNIvERsITY of SHEffiEld The research will involve multiple stakeholders from academia, utilities and the supply chain

• Cover