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Exeter Engineering's Centre for Water Systems (CWS) undertakes internationally leading fundamental and applied research in the $500bn global water sector. EPSRC-funded research has underpinned impacts with both reach and significance in the areas of practitioner and professional services and economic impact. CWS staff have co-authored authoritative best practice guides with highly respected practitioner publishers: the Construction Industry Research and Information Association (CIRIA), the Building Research Establishment (BRE) and Spon Press. These have been widely used in the water sector, and construction and built environment sector. CWS software and knowhow have been used extensively by water service providers (such as Scottish Water) and their consultants (including SEAMS, originally an Exeter spinout) to enhance business performance by identifying efficiencies, saving costs and improving operation. Optimisation software has been made freely available and has hundreds of users worldwide including consultants and financial organisations.
New characterisation tools for natural organic matter (NOM) in drinking water are now used as standard practice within water companies such as Severn Trent Water, United Utilities and Yorkshire Water. The tools inform decisions, and help develop strategic plans on catchment management, source selection, treatment optimisation, and disinfection practice. Water companies experienced difficulties in treating high levels of NOM. Cranfield created a novel characterisation toolkit to measure NOM for its electrical charge and hydrophobicity. Also, new techniques for measuring aggregate properties and emerging disinfection by-products have provided a comprehensive analysis. Two novel treatment technologies are currently marketed. These technologies have raised international interest, resulting in industrial development in Australia.
Our research on the natural processes that reduce pollutant concentrations in the subsurface has enabled the UK to adopt "Natural Attenuation" as a management policy and has changed professional practice at many contaminated sites. The massively reduced costs of this approach over active clean-up of sites in 2008-13 has saved a minimum of £100M for the UK. Our research has also influenced European practice, saving hundreds of millions of Euros. The beneficiaries are typically chemical industries of all sizes, from refineries to small repackaging plants and petrol station owners, but also local authorities and the State in cases where they would bear the cost of clean-up.
Newcastle's research has shaped national policy and practice on the management of flooding and agricultural pollution, and international policy and practice in the developing world on managing forested catchments and sustainable water resources management. We show evidence that our research has:
Spinout Salamander was created to exploit research in the UoA on environmental monitoring. Building on the research, the company has developed and marketed a suite of branded products: two for monitoring water-quality in distribution (Hydraclam® and Chloroclam®) and one for monitoring ground gas (Gasclam®). In each case the defining feature is the ability to provide secure, standalone, continuous monitoring. The products have been licensed to Siemens (Hydraclam® and Chloroclam®) and Ionscience (Gasclam®), and have had significant impact on "best practicable means" and, hence, major impacts on regulated industries. Since 2008, Salamander has received royalties of over £1.0m, commensurate with end-user sales of £7.0m.
The intensification of food production, fossil fuel combustion and water consumption has led to substantial increases in the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus flushed from land to water. The accumulation of these nutrients in freshwaters, estuaries and the coastal zone has led to reductions in biodiversity, the loss of ecosystem services, and compromised water security. The UK is a signatory to a raft of international conventions and policies which require reductions in the flux of nutrients from land to the water and restoration of ecosystem health and services. To meet these obligations, policymakers need information on the scale of the problem, the sources of nutrients and the effectiveness of intervention measures.
Research in the Unit has directly addressed this need. It has provided robust scientific evidence of the scale of the problem and the sources of nutrient enrichment, and has provided the capability to test intervention and policy scenarios at field to national scales. It has fed directly into the development of monitoring approaches and mitigation measures now in use by the Environment Agency (EA) and Defra, informed the development of UK Government policy in relation to catchment management, and supported compliance with the EU Water Framework Directive, the renegotiation of the Gothenburg Protocol under the International Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, and reporting on discharges of nutrient pollution to the North East Atlantic under the OSPAR Convention.
Research conducted at the Geoenvironmental Research Centre (GRC), supported by the European Commission via its EURATOM programme, has been instrumental in addressing the long standing global problem of high level nuclear waste disposal. The pioneering development of a sophisticated coupled thermal/hydraulic/chemical/mechanical model of clay behaviour has provided new understanding of the performance of engineered barriers proposed for use in nuclear waste repositories. This has, in an unprecedented development, directly enabled the design of numerous nuclear waste repositories to proceed. The repositories in Sweden and Finland are currently at "Licence application" and "Construction" phases, respectively. Therefore the impacts claimed during the REF period are: significant impact on engineering design, leading to improved environmental conditions; considerable economic investment and marked impact on public policy and services.
The Hydro-environmental Research Centre (HRC) at Cardiff University has developed a widely used hydro-environmental numerical model, called DIVAST (Depth Integrated Velocities And Solute Transport). DIVAST addresses the need for more accurate models to predict flood risk and water quality levels for a range of extreme events. The model has been implemented in commercial codes, marketed by CH2M HILL (previously Halcrow), and used in design studies, for example, undertaken by Buro Happold. The impacts of the research are marked environmental, health, economic and industrial benefits. It is used by major organisations around the world on large-scale projects and, in particular, for mitigation planning against national and international risks associated with floods and water quality.
Efficient city-wide water distribution systems (WDS) are vital to the health and financial wellbeing of the cities' inhabitants. The impact of research on evolutionary algorithms and heuristics at Exeter has been to provide efficient water distribution system designs on a city-wide basis for a large city, the City of Ottawa. As part of a programme of building and upgrading infrastructure costing in excess of $225M CAD, the City has implemented large-scale capital projects based on designs produced by genetic algorithm technology, made possible by utilising the heuristics and modular optimisation developed by Keedwell and colleagues at the University of Exeter.
Under future climates, wildfire will exacerbate threats to water security. Our research demonstrates that burning of surface vegetation can invigorate hillslope hydrological response with marked increases in sediment and nutrient delivery to river networks and reservoirs. Negative water quality effects include high turbidity, toxic algal blooms and fish kills with implications for water supply at critical times in the water year. Through quantifying post-fire runoff and nutrient yield processes, the research has informed (i) catchment management decisions, policies and water resource risk assessment in Australia and (ii) water industry resource protection plans in the UK.