Control and optimisation of new and existing wastewater infrastructure: Enabling control of GHG emissions and energy use while meeting discharge limits and maximising treatment capacity.
Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) play a critical role in protecting human health and preventing pollution. They are key to enabling society meet the growth in demand from housing and industry. Given widely reported infrastructure capacity issues, there is an imperative to ensure existing and new WWTPs assets are operated efficiently. In Ireland (and globally) most WWPTs have limited or low levels of control and thus operate inefficiently. There is a clear industry need for innovative systems that enable WWTPs operate efficiently across 4 parameters (i) discharge limits (ii) maximising capacity, (iii) limiting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and (iv) limiting resource consumption. The University of Galway, Ward & Burke Ltd and Uisce Éireann have initiated a full-scale case-study project to address this gap. To fully enable this innovative work there is a need for direct measurement of process GHG emissions. This application proposed purchasing an off-gas analyser system to monitor the GHGs directly emitted from the case-study WWTP. This will enable innovative process control trials, that improve WWTP performance and maintain compliance, while reducing direct and indirect GHG emissions. The outputs could transform how WWTP stakeholders make evidence-based, cost-effective decisions that support climate targets and reduce operating costs.
Lead RPO: University of Galway
Lead PI: Eoghan Clifford
Industry Partners: Ward and Burke Construction Ltd.
Collaborators
Principal Investigator
Dr Eoghan Clifford
Professor of Engineering and Head of Discipline of Civil Engineering, University of Galway
Eoghan Clifford is a chartered engineer and Professor of Engineering at the University of Galway. He graduated with a BE and PhD degrees (both Environmental Engineering) in 2002 and 2010 respectively from NUI Galway. He is currently the Head of Discipline of the Academic Director of the CÉIM peer-mentoring programme within the School of Engineering. Eoghans key research and educational interests lie in the areas of wastewater and water engineering, process modelling and life cycle assessment.Eoghansresearch team has ongoing and significant EU, national and industry research funding. His team currently coordinates ENERGE (Interreg NWE), is technical lead on INNOQUA (H2020) and a WP leader on NEPTUNUS project (InterReg Atlantic Areas). He has previously coordinated the Waternomics (FP7) project and a variety of projects funded by national and industry sources through competitive research grants. He has been involved in projects with a total value of 70 million. Of these he has been the coordinator, principal investigator or co-PI on projects worth 55 million. The total direct funding value to the University of Galway of these projects is 7.5 million. He is also collaborating with the technical University of Eindhoven on modelling the aerodynamics of paralympic cyclists on tandem andhandcycles.
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