Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/705933
In the know A major new research facility which will allow scientists to discover more sustainable and affordable ways to treat wastewater has been opened at a sewage treatment works in the north east. Newcastle University's new Biological Engineering: Wastewater Innovation at Scale (BE:WISE) research facility is a European first in large-scale wastewater treatment research using bacteria. Jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Newcastle Univer- sity and Northumbrian Water, RESEARCH ROUND UP Research centre to explore low carbon sewage treatment the £1.7M plant is the largest facility of its type in Europe. Based at Northumbrian Water's sewage treatment plant at Birtley, it will play a key role in improving how sewage is treated. The costs and uncertainty involved in scaling up lab research to application in a real-world setting has meant that there has been little change over the years in the main technologies used at sewage treatment plants. Operating as a 'mini' sewage treatment works, the BE:WISE facility will allow experiments to be run using 10,000 times more RISING UP Jerry Grant has been appointed Managing Director of Irish Water, following the departure of John Tierney. He has been appointed by Irish Water's parent company Ervia on a two-year contract. Grant has been Head of Asset Management with the utility since its formation in April 2013. Global infrastructure services company AECOM has appointed Adrian Rees as Director of Asset Management in the UK & Ireland, a newly created role. Rees joins AECOM from ICS Consulting, where he gave consulting advice to clients on a range of matters, including their price review and AMP period preparatory work. Jim Dixon has been appointed as the new independent chair of Northumbrian Water Group's Water Forums. Dixon will be chairing two panels representing customers that challenge and guide Northumbrian Water and Essex & Suffolk Water. He has previously worked with the Royal Household, Number 10, and Chairs of National Agencies. Barhale has appointed Matthew Behan as its new chief executive with effect from August 1, 2016. For the past five years, Behan has been group chief finance officer at J Murphy & Sons. Barhale has created a new Group Holding Board on which Behan will sit working alongside Dennis Curran, Andy Flowerday and Noel Hanley. Asset International has hired Alexia Evans as project manager to support its new growth phase. She joins the Newport-based firm from South Wales training firm T2. microbes than can be used in the laboratory, providing researchers with a realistic, large-scale setting to better understand how complex biological interactions work at different scales. Dr Russell Davenport, from Newcastle University's School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences who will lead the work said: "If the water industry is to move to a low energy, low carbon alternative that meets ever-increasing environmental standards, in an affordable way, it has to innovate. BE:WISE will help bring about exciting new collaborations to develop new approaches and solutions to these challenges." Northumbrian Water is providing the space where BE:WISE is located, along with key infrastructure support. The first experiments - to identify the behaviour of thousands of species of bacteria - will get underway immediately, using wastewater from the Birtley sewage treatment plant, which receives wastewater from a population equivalent of around 30,000 people. Heidi Mottram, North- umbrian Water's CEO, said: "This internationally significant facility demon- strates Northumbrian Water's environmental leadership. It shows how essential part- nership working is to enable innovation in advancing technology." ● 24 Innovation Zone: Leakage ● 27 Digging Deeper: Flood protection ● 31 Getting to Grips: Industrial effluent ● 35 Products: Pumps 13 Sep Utility Week HR Forum, Birmingham 14 Sep WWT Integrated Water Resource Management Conference, Birmingham 27 Sep WWT Drinking Water Conference, B'ham 28 Sep Global Leakage Summit, London COmING UP A new type of nanofilter that could reduce the energy needed to treat wastewater by up to five times has been developed by scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The last steps of water purification in a wastewater treatment process would typically see an ultrafiltration (UF) membrane filtering out small particles before a reverse osmosis (RO) membrane is used. In RO, water is pushed through an extremely fine membrane at high pressure to separate water molecules from any remaining contaminants. This high water pressure, typically 10bars and above, means that the water pumps need a lot of energy. However, NTU's proprietary nanofiltration (NF) hollow fibre membrane does away with both ultrafiltration and RO, combining the two processes. It also requires only 2 bars of water pressure, similar to the pressure found in a typical home pressure cooker, to filter out the same type of contaminants. Yet it produces water that is almost as pure as through RO, said NTU. The technology took NTU's Nanyang Environment and Water Research Institute (NEWRI) two years to develop, and is now being commercialised by NTU spin- off company De.Mem. Energy-efficient nanofilter breakthrough 22 | AUGUST 2016 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk L-R: Prof Nick Wright, Heidi Mottram and Dr Russell Davenport