Demoware, FHNW School of Life Sciences

The ability of Europe’s communities to respond to increasing water stress by taking advantage of water reuse opportunities is restricted by low public confidence in solutions, inconsistent approaches to evaluating costs and benefits of reuse schemes, and poor coordination of the professionals and organisations who design, implement and manage them.

The DEMOWARE initiative aimed at rectifying these shortcomings by executing a highly collaborative programme of demonstration and exploitation, using nine existing and one greenfield site to stimulate innovation and improve cohesion within the evolving European water reuse sector.

The project was guided by SME & industry priorities and had two central ambitions:

• to enhance the availability and reliability of innovative water reuse solutions
• to create a unified professional identity for the European Water Reuse sector

By deepening the evidence base around treatment processes and reuse scheme operation, process monitoring and performance control, and risk management and environmental benefit analysis DEMOWARE intended to improve both operator and public confidence in reuse schemes. The project advanced the quality and usefulness of business models and pricing strategiesand generated culturally and regulatory regime specific guidance on appropriate governance and stakeholder collaboration processes.

The FHNW School of Life Sciences led the work package on process monitoring and performance control, in which our group specifically looked into membrane integrity testing of porous membranes. In this context various particle detecting or counting devices were tested.

EU project website