Research Projects

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.

CO2 emissions currently represent the 77% of the total greenhouse gas emissions of anthropogenic origin. It provokes a gradual increase in global warming of our planet with catastrophic environmental consequences. There is no doubt about the need to promote a transition toward an economy avoiding the intensive use of fossil fuels, i.e., using the electricity generated from renewable sources as primary source of energy, and favoring alternative and more sustainable chemical processes. The project "Development of intermittent plasmas ignited by renewable electricity for the CO2 splitting and revalorization processes", RENOVACO2, aims at developing atmospheric plasma technologies that use electricity as a direct energy vector to induce chemical processes that are currently carried out through catalytic techniques (i.e., at high pressures and temperatures, using harmful and non-recyclable catalysts). RENOVACO2 is a multidisciplinary project that pursuits the development of novel physical processes for the elimination and revalorization of CO2, especially designed and optimized for their activation by means of renovably energy sources. The proposed technology consist of using atmospheric pressure plasmas to induce chemical reactions in non-equilibrium conditions at atmospheric pressure and in a distributed way.