Annual report Chair on Drinking Water Engineering 2007 - TU Delft

Mission statement chair on Drinking Water Engineering
The Dutch water sector is characterised by a well developed and large scale infrastructure and organisation.
The primary goal of the sector is to provide high quality drinking water at acceptable costs and with minimal
impact on the environment. Future developments that will challenge this goal include water pollution and
increased expectations from clients and government.
The focus of the <strong>Chair</strong> on Drinking Water Engineering is well attuned to the goals of the Dutch drinking water
sector. As a result of this, the group focuses on the following research questions:
• How should we deal with emerging threats to the water quality such as endocrine disrupting compounds
(EDC’s), pharmaceuticals and Legionella and how should we develop emerging technologies such as mem-
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• How can we improve water quality and reduce costs and environmental impact by modelling and improved
operation of the infrastructure?
• How will we take care that the water produced at a treatment plant will not deteriorate in the distribution
system?
• How do we safe guard the drinking water supply for all people. Not only at the moment, but also in the
future?
The mission of the research programme is to achieve practical breakthroughs in these niches by a coordinated
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together within a well-developed network with the stake holders from science and industry, we aim to cover
the complete innovation cycle, from the initial brain wave, through research planning, funding and execution,
to implementation in practice and sometimes also valorisation/commercialisation.
Research approach
We believe in challenging our PhD students. We ask them to present their work frequently at our monthly colloquia,
meetings with project steering committees, at national workshops and at international congresses. They
are also required to publish their results, both in Dutch and international journals. The research projects are
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these partners, which ensures that the projects are well prepared and supported. Many experiments are carried
out at water and waste water treatment plants and the results are applied directly in practice. This provides
a highly stimulating environment for our PhD students. Some experiments are carried out in the Laboratory
of Sanitary Engineering or in cooperation with the Laboratory of Fluid Mechanics or other laboratories of Delft
University of Technology, such as ChemTech and Biotechnology.
Our research philosophy includes obtaining a mixture of desk-top research, laboratory experiments, pilot-plant
experiments and full-scale experiments. Computer modelling is very important as it enables us to understand
the complex reality and limit the number of experiments to achieve an optimal result. We use laboratory experiments
to test our initial hypothesis on synthetic water. We also need pilot-plant experiments at treatment plant
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carry out full-scale investigations at treatment plants and pipe networks in order to study the effect of large
scale hydraulic (mal-) distribution.
10 <strong>Annual</strong> <strong>report</strong> DWE 2007