Research Projects

The PHOTOSINT project presents solutions to the challenges chemical industries are facing in integrating renewable energy sources into their processes. The project will deliver sustainable processes to produce hydrogen and methanol as energy vectors using only sunlight as an energy source and wastewater and CO2 as feedstocks, making the industries more auto-sufficient. The pathway is based on solar-driven artificial photosynthesis, and aims to develop new catalytic earth-abundant materials and modifications of existing ones to improve catalytic processes. Design parameters of the PEC cell will be tuned to maximize solar to fuel (STF) efficiency. Moreover to improve the conversion for industrial implementation, PHOTOSINT will develop a novel way to concentrate and illuminate the semiconductor surface to maximize overall energy efficiency. Perovskite solar PV cells will be integrated to harvest the light to supply the external electrical voltage.

PHOTOSINT is an ambitious project due to precedents in research conducted to date and the low production rate of the desired products. For integrating sunlight energy into the industry, the catalyst will be studied, and then the best one/s will be implemented in prototypes. The obtained results will be used for making scale-up in pilots with tandem PEC cells. These steps are necessary to assess the industrial scale-up feasibility, promoting the increased competitiveness of renewable process energy technologies and energy independence. MeOH and H2 will be tested in engines. Also, an HTPEM fuel cell will be used for electricity generation, and hydrogen will be tested as an alternative fuel for energy generation instead natural gas in melting furnaces avoiding CO2 emissions.

Water is one of the natural resources that, due to its limited and variable nature, both in quantity and quality, should be protected with special intensity, in line with the Environmental Objectives that support the ecological transition: sustainable use and protection of water and marine resources, circular economy, pollution prevention and control, and protection and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystems. Studies realized in collaboration with the Confederación Hidrográfica del Ebro, the urban point sources are the pressures that in most cases are the cause of non-compliance
with the environmental quality objectives established by the DMA. This non-compliance are mainly related to microbiological contamination in the receiving waters of these discharges.
Generally, as there is no legal requirement, wastewater treatment facilities do not include disinfection processes that reduce the microbiological load of effluents and, consequently, these agents are incorporated into natural waters, limiting the usemade of them, especially in supplying populations and recreational use (bathing and others). Likewise, such contamination in wastewater limits the possibility of its subsequent reuse, reducing the capacity to increase the availability of water resources. It is important to remark that, water reuse for agricultural irrigation can also contribute to circular economy by recovering nutrients from the reclaimed water and applying them to crops, by means of fertigation techniques. Thus, water reuse could potentially reduce the need for supplemental applications of mineral fertilizer.
Therefore, it is necessary to intensify the wastewater treatment efficiency by non-conventional processes that improve the treated water quality with the final objective of allowing a safe reuse of effluents, taking into account the regulation (EU) 2020/741. On the other hand, the control of more microbiological parameters is essential for a correct analysis of the technologies application. Aware of this need, the AySA group has been developing research projects for many years focus on the research about conventional and non-conventional processes, based on photocatalytic processes, applied for disinfection waters and about the microbiological control in urban wastewater treatment plants. The main objective of this project is to select the best technology for disinfection of treated urban wastewater for full-scale application by the improvement of previously studied advanced oxidation processes in the disinfection of these type of waters. Furthermore, the microbiological control, not only by bacterial indicators conventionally used but also protozoa and endosymbiotic bacteria that are inside amoebae, is consider very relevant in this project since to our knowledge, there are no studies investigating such a wide range of potentially pathogenic micro-organisms. This realistic approach is expected to minimise the impact on the receiving waters and increase the possibility of reuse, reducing the the health and environmental risk.