Consortium led by the UC receives 4 million euros to develop innovative technology to guarantee drinking water quality

English version: Diana Taborda

H2OforlAll is an ambitious international project led by the University of Coimbra (UC), which aims to develop a set of innovative technologies that act in the area of protection, monitoring and decontamination of drinking water, guaranteeing the best quality of the water we drink, as well as establishing guidelines for policy makers, both in what concerns legislation and the population behaviour.

In order to achieve these goals, the project led by Rui Martins (Department of Chemical Engineering of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra – FCTUC), has been granted 4 million euros by the European Union (EU) in the scope of the Horizon Europe programme. H2OforAll takes off on the 1st of November, with a duration of 3 years. Besides Portugal, the project involves researchers and companies from Germany, Belgium, Cyprus, Israel, the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Sweden.

Overall, the various project teams will develop cutting-edge technologies to monitor the quality of domestic drinking water, protect drinking water sources and reduce the amount of disinfection products in these waters.

Taking into account the severe phenomena caused by climate change, such as extreme drought and contamination caused by human action, the deterioration of drinking water sources tends to worsen, requiring greater amounts of disinfectants to ensure the quality of drinking water.

According to Rui Martins, this scenario makes it urgent to develop new methods and technologies that ensure, now and in the future “the maximum safety of drinking water. In order to disinfect drinking water, more and more chlorine has to be used, which is essential to prevent diseases. The downside is the production of the so-called disinfection by-products (DBPs), chemicals produced as a result of the reaction between the disinfectants and the organic compounds present in the original water.”

If these disinfection products are not identified and monitored, “they may present hazard to human health and to ecosystems”, adds the FCTUC researcher, further highlighting that one of the project goals is precisely to “prevent the formation of those DBPs, by using water pre-treatment processes that are able to remove the compounds that promote those disinfection by-products. On the other hand, we intend to develop alternative innovative disinfection strategies that do not contain chemicals, using for instance ultraviolet radiation: when we remove or diminish the amount of chlorine to be put in the water, we reduce the probability of DBPs formation”

As for monitoring, H2OforAll proposes to develop technological solutions to control and monitor the entire water course - from capture to distribution. Martins adds “We will develop appropriate sensors for monitoring the water quality along the whole circuit and, from the data collected in several countries, create models able to predict the behaviour of water and DBPs along the distribution chains, in order to apply timely corrective measures if necessary. In addition, the project also includes toxicity studies of disinfection by-products, essential to assess their impact, both on human health and on the balance of ecosystems.”

All the technological solutions developed under the project will be tested in a pilot installation created by the company Adventech. Afterwards, a case study will be performed in a real environment in the municipal company "Águas de Coimbra", a partner of the project. The choice is supported by the "recognized quality of Águas de Coimbra water, which poses great challenges, especially in terms of validation, i.e., the technologies we develop will have to be highly sensitive", says Rui Martins.

At the end of the project, the consortium will also draw up a set of prevention technical recommendations, to avoid contamination of sources of drinking water, and guidelines that can contribute to changing European legislation in this area and the behaviour to be adopted by the population. The researchers believe that H2OforAll will have a great impact, allowing "to remedy current and future environmental problems, which will be increasingly severe due to the scarcity of drinking water and due to extreme climate phenomena".

At the UC, the project involves four research centres: the Chemical Process Engineering and Forest Products Research Centre (CIEPQPF), the Coimbra Chemistry Centre (CQC), the Centre for Mechanical Engineering, Materials and Processes (CEMMPRE) and the Coimbra Institute for Systems Engineering and Computers (INESC Coimbra), in a cooperation platform between researchers Rui Martins, Luísa Durães, João Gomes, Igor Reva, Artur Valente, Paula Morais and Nuno Simões.