Inauguration of the Centre of Excellence in Water Treatment and Management at PDEU

INDIA H2O is proud to announce the official opening of its Centre of Excellence in Water Treatment and Management at Pandit Deendayal Energy University, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India on 25th March 2022. The centre was opened as part of the 1st International Conference on Advances in Water Treatment and Management (ICAWTM-22).

The objective of COE in water at PDEU is to develop, design and demonstrate high-recovery low-cost water treatment systems for saline groundwater and for domestic and industrial wastewaters. The focus for developments will be in the arid state of Gujarat, where surface water resources are very scarce. Cost-effective technologies and systems are proposed with the aim of lowering energy costs through dramatic improvements in energy efficiency, new bio-based approaches to water recycling, and use of renewable energy. Reject waste streams will be minimised or reduced to zero, thus protecting the environment. Advanced membrane processes, including biomimetic FO and RO and layer-by-layer assembly of ultra/nano-filtration membranes, will be developed and combined to provide new methods to purify water from saline groundwater and from municipal and industrial wastewaters, providing water that is safe for drinking or suitable for irrigation. They will be implemented in cost-effective modes in systems incorporating phytoremediation and complementary processes. Low-cost sensors for real-time monitoring of the key parameters important for efficient operation of membrane processes will be integrated with monitoring and management systems to ease maintenance of performance and ensure sustainability of these systems which have previously suffered from a lack of robust and reliable operational data, leading to frequent early failure and redundancy. The remote monitoring will collect data for analysis of long term performance, feeding into decision support tools for design and operation. Systems will be developed and integrated to TRL6 as advanced prototypes that will be integrated with renewable energy sources under real operational conditions in the arid and industrialised state of Gujarat, with prospective applications in many other water-stressed and salinized areas such as Rajasthan, Punjab and Tamil Nadu.