The alliance of TU/e, WUR, UU, and UMC Utrecht (EWUU) has appointed two Scientific Directors and a Director of EWUU Education to strengthen the collaboration between the four institutes in Eindhoven, Wageningen, and Utrecht.
By Angeli Mehta2021-05-04T08:58:00+01:00
With clean water supplies increasingly scarce, Angeli Mehta looks at what industry is doing to reduce its demands
Fresh water is in parlous state. Droughts in South Africa and in Europe in 2018 were a wake-up call to industry. In Cape Town, the city came close to ‘day zero’ with the prospect of taps running dry. ‘We knew it was going to happen, but
the
fact that it came very quickly and dramatically was unexpected,’ says Kevin Winter, at the Future Water Institute at the University of Cape Town. ‘It caused the public to talk about water like they’ve never done before.’ In Europe, major navigation routes on the Rhine were almost impassable, ships carrying chemicals ran aground and water extraction for cooling was restricted. BASF, Evonik, Solvay and Shell Chemical all had to cut production, and the Germany economy took a hit.
AquaConnect – ‘Key technologies for safeguarding regional water provision in fresh water stressed deltas’.
More and more often in the Netherlands we are faced with fresh water shortages due to severe drought. The extensive AquaConnect consortium offers a solution for this: the researchers want to enable the use of wastewater and brackish groundwater with new water purification technologies. The program will show four regions how they can become self-sufficient in fresh water supply as an example for other places in the world.
Programme leader: Prof. Dr. Huub Rijnaarts (Wageningen University & Research)
Involved from TU/e: prof. Jeroen Voeten (department of Electrical Engineering)
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TU/e involved in all six Perspective programs
In the coming years, six consortia of companies, educational and knowledge institutions and governments will work on research aimed at technological innovation with economic potential. Within the so-called Perspective program of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) they will receive a total of 22 million euros from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Change and 10 million euros from the 138 companies and civil society organizations involved. TU/e is part of all six consortia, and is also program leader in two of them.
Perspective is a program that challenges scientists to set up new lines of research with economic and social impact in collaboration with industry and civil society organizations. Perspective aims to contribute to the creation of economic opportunities within the key technologies and societal themes of the mission-driven innovation policy.