Projectes de l'ICRA

Future challenges, including climate change and the resulting unpredictability of precipitation patterns and temporal or permanent water scarcity, generate a high diversity of demands on water treatment technologies obliging them to be able to cater towards a variety of source and target water qualities. It is evident that this will generate a market pull towards the development of new water treatment technologies or improving the integration of existing technologies. Conventional wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) were designed to protect aquatic bodies mainly by removing loads of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous, but not organic micropollutants, as it is evidenced by the increased detection of these compounds in the aquatic environment. Also, current wastewater treatment practice, despite the significant technological advances adopted over the years, is still a limiting factor in converting wastewater into a water resource for meeting reuse requirements including potable needs.

To date, one of the main challenges is to appropriately evaluate the different treatment technologies regarding their potential to minimize the toxicological risks for biota and human health. INNOTREAT aims at integrating the last advances in high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) and data mining to develop innovative tools for the assessment of the overall quality of any water treatment. These tools will provide rapid and deep assessment on the performance of a given treatment (conventional or innovative) regarding the removal of polar organic compounds and generated transformation products, among others. Several treatments will be evaluated including processes with and without change in the chemical identity of the pollutants (based only on physical processes or based on biological or oxidation processes, respectively). The tools generated in INNOTREAT can be used to quickly evaluate any water treatment and will produce a substantial impact on the field of water research.

El Programa Beatriu de Pinós 2018 está cofinanciado por la Unión Europea a través del programa COFUND (nº de contrato 801370) de las acciones Marie Sklodowska-Curie para la contratación de investigadores por parte de programas de excelencia y con movimiento transnacional dentro del programa marco "Horizon 2020"