On 13 February 2018, Jannis Wenk, Davide Mattia, John Chew and Jan Hofman visited the Urban Water Systems Engineering group of the TU Munich. Our hosts, Prof Jörg Drewes and Dr Uwe Hübner presented the work of chair and showed their impressive pilot plants and research facilities. The group of Prof Drewes is working on a wide range of topics in the field of water and wastewater engineering. One of their focal points is the research on the removal of organic micropollutants in Managed Aquifer Recharge systems. Their research in this field included small scale filter column tests, a large sand-filled pilot plant and full-scale experiment in Berlin near the Tegelsee. Another interesting project was the power-to-gas project in which carbon dioxide and hydrogen were converted to methane gas in trickling bed filters. The gas has a high purity and can be fed directly into the gas grid. The hydrogen was obtained by water electrolysis with electricity from renewable sources in times of low demand.
Besides these two topics, further research was amongst others on ozone systems, UV oxidation, Anaerobic Digestion, Analytical screening techniques, environmental behaviour of microplastics, the urban water-energy-food nexus.
The WIRC delegation gave an overview of WIRC and our research on new materials for water treatment, microbubbles, fluid dynamics gauging and heat recovery from sewers. In the discussions it became clear that there are very good opportunities for collaboration. Jannis Wenk is already involved the supervision of Sema Karakurt, one of the PhD students in Munich. We anticipate that the visit will be followed up by some more visits and possibly PhD student exchanges. Dr Uwe Hübner will visit Bath in the future for a combined Chemical Engineering Seminar and Water Colloquium. The exact date will be announced.
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