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WP2 - Process monitoring and performance control

WP2 aims at demonstrating advanced monitoring and control options for water recycling schemes which enable better understanding of contaminant fate and safe operation of full-scale systems. The inherent risk in water recycling stems from the wide range and potential negative impact of contaminants in wastewater. Treatment technologies and appropriate use practices are able to mitigate those risks but the range of contaminants of concern gets wider with an ever growing spectrum of organisms and chemicals detected in reclaimed wastewater as the analytical capacities increase.


WP2 aims at demonstrating advanced monitoring and control options for water recycling schemes which enable better understanding of contaminant fate and safe operation of full-scale systems.

The inherent risk in water recycling stems from the wide range and potential negative impact of contaminants in wastewater. Treatment technologies and appropriate use practices are able to mitigate those risks but the range of contaminants of concern gets wider with an ever growing spectrum of organisms and chemicals detected in reclaimed wastewater as the analytical capacities increase.

Based on a better understanding of contaminant occurrence and fate operators should be enabled to monitor their water recycling processes more effectively. Means to increase control effectiveness are e.g. establishment of online controls of surrogate parameters representing indicators of key contaminants, their cumulative effect (e.g. toxicological or eco-toxicological) or process effectiveness (e.g. physical integrity of a membrane filter). The suitability of innovative online control technologies has to be proven based on the establishment of correlations to the actual contaminants of relevance. Finally, guidelines will be issued on good practices for process control of water recycling systems with different intended end-uses.

The general objective of WP2 is to demonstrate approaches for the assurance of desired routes/fate of reclaimed water constituents (pathogens, contaminants as well as nutrients) in various reuse applications covering the full scheme from treatment through distribution to actual application. This specifically includes

  • The demonstration and testing of advanced monitoring and control options for microbial and chemical contaminants.
  • To test advanced technologies to control the integrity of treatment barriers.
  • To provide end-user specific recommendations on process monitoring and performance control of water reuse schemes.