Monitoring key substances to determine water quality and status currently involves analyzing various samples in a laboratory using expensive equipment that requires specialized personnel and significant analysis time. Furthermore, water quality is only known at specific times, and these results are then generalized to all other times when no samples were taken.
In many cases, when the analysis results are obtained, some of the substances may have already passed into the environment or affected the purification process, requiring corrective measures for their removal.
In this sense, greater control of water quality offers better production; however, currently no technology has been implemented that allows continuous, real-time monitoring of priority substances and adaptation of processes according to their presence.
For all these reasons, a group of leading companies in the sector have joined forces to create the DELINE project, a major research and technological development project whose objective is the industrial development of a technology that allows the identification of emerging contaminants in water to improve the quality of wastewater through the automatic and real-time measurement of absorption spectra, at different wavelengths, of samples in Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) and the exploitation of available water resources.
The system is expected to improve both the operating costs of wastewater treatment plants and the time required to analyze pollutants. The reduction in analysis time, thanks to the automatic, on-site measurement of water samples, will enable immediate alerts for the detection of toxic substances, leading to significant improvements in the quality and efficiency of water use.
The project is already under development and is expected to be completed in 2018. Its execution will involve an investment of almost €1.3M, of which 50.31% corresponds to the contribution of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), within the framework of the State Plan for Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation 2013-2016, specifically within the ERDF INNTERCONECTA call, managed by the Centre for Technological and Industrial Development (CDTI).
Ambling a pioneering center in Extremadura in the operation of wastewater treatment plants, drinking water treatment plants and natural resource management, leads this project in which four other national companies participate as partners in the consortium, AGQ, chemical technology center; SET, a company specializing in the execution of high-level software and communications engineering projects; SOLTEL, an IT services company specializing in BPM and Business Intelligence technologies, and Coveless, a company specializing in automation, robotics and machine vision solutions.
This research project also involves specialized organizations such as the Andalusian Foundation for Image, Color and Optics (FAICO) and the Technology Center CARTIF.
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