AQWATEC

I’m currently in Colorado visiting Assoc Prof Jorg Drewes at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM). Jorg is well recognised for his research which has improved the understanding of how trace chemical contaminants are removed from water during various treatment processes. I mentioned some of Jorg’s research previously regarding the membrane rejection diagram developed by Jorg and one of his post-doctoral researchers.

Jorg is also the Director of the new Advanced Water Quality Centre (AQWATEC), which was opened at CSM this week. I was fortunate to be visiting during the week of the official ribbon cutting.











Despite the dodgy acronym, AQWATEC is a great facility for advancing our understanding of water treatment and water recycling processes. A significant amount of effort has been invested in developing pilot-scale water treatment operations. These can be used to examine the impacts that various operational changes may have on treated water quality. Furthermore, these pilot-scale apparatus will be extremely useful for investigations into the optimisation of energy efficiency and membrane life-span.

Pilot-scale rigs in the AQWATEC currently include:

- Reverse osmosis
- Nanofiltration
- Forward osmosis
- Membrane distillation
- Soil transport columns (to simulate soil-aquifer treatment)
- Coagulation/flocculation
- Dual media filtration
- Capacitive deionisation
- Electrodialysis
- Fluidised bed crystallisation
- Activated sludge bioreactor

About 60 people came along to the grand opening including a Colorado Congressman (Ed Perlmutter), the Executive Director of the Awwa Research Foundation (Rob Renner) and representatives of the US Bureau of Reclamation.


Expect to see plenty of quality research coming from the AQWATEC during the next few years.