IWEX University Challenge

Faversham House Group are pleased to announce the winner of the IWEX University Challenge which took place this year at the International Water & Effluent Exhibition (IWEX) on Thursday, 26 May 2011.

Aimed at all universities and research centres active in the water sector, we were looking for the latest water research projects promising to deliver:

• Increased efficiency and cost savings for existing procedures and technologies
• New procedures and technologies
• Energy savings
• More sustainable water management
• More effective treatment of unwanted particles in water

The 8 successful entries were given the opportunity to present their project in front of the judging panel - made up of Ian Walker, WRc; Alastair Moseley, WSP Group; Steve Kaye, Anglian Water and Ken Gedman, Grontmij and an industry audience at IWEX 2011.  The judging panel selected and announced the winner from all presentations.

The winner of the IWEX University Challenge was Bruce Jefferson from Cranfield University whose research focused on the challenge of meeting increasing stringent wastewater discharge quality standards sustainably.  With uspport from UKWIR and six UK water companies, his team has investigated how a media based on embedded iron nonaparticles could be applied for phosphorus removal.  The research has identified that the media was able to meet the potential future discharge contestants, irrespective of background conditions, because the nanoparticles form a strong ligand bond with phosphorus, enabling selective removal.

Runners-up were John Bridgeman of the University of Birmingham, who is developing novel fluorescence-based instrumentation to assess treated water quality in real-time, and Alan Zhang of WRc, who is investigating non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) for electric motors.

If you have any more questions regarding the IWEX University Challenge, please do not hesitate to contact Stacey Bird.