Projects - Eawag

The Urban Water Management department projects are organised according to four research areas:

Systems Engineering (Tove Larsen, Max Maurer, João Leitão, Lauren Cook) looks at the engineering options and methodologies to lead urban water infrastructure into a sustainable future.

Source typing and tracking (Christoph Ort, Jörg Rieckermann) The quantification of pollutant loads in wastewater is, on the one hand, a requirement to minimize impacts of pollutants to the environment, and, on the other hand, it also offers a unique opportunity to learn about human lifestyle changes and also to develop early warning systems.

Intelligent Network Operations (Jörg Rieckermann, João Leitão) aims to (i) develop methods to improve data on key variables and states of our wastewater systems, such as, rainfall, flows, and pollutant discharges to receiving waters, (ii) provide better models to assess water and pollutant fluxes, as well as, urban flood risk and aging infrastructure.

Urban Water Observatory (Max Maurer) is a test-bed where modern measurement equipment provides us with a detailed picture about the processes in an urban water catchment.

Goal is an improved planning procedure for sustainable water supply and wastewater infrastructure management that links into the existing Swiss governance structures.

Sustainable Water Infrastructure Planning (SWIP)

An inter- and transdisciplinary strategic research program that strives to develop novel non-gridconnected water and sani- tation systems that can function as comparable alternatives to network-based systems.

Water and sanitation innovations for non-grid solutions (Wings)

The population has a high willingness to pay for reducing risks of wastewater flooding or combined sewer overflows

Valuing Adaptation to Climate Change Risks in the Water Sector

Urban Water Infrastructure Model (UWIM)

How can the overall performance of distributed treatment systems be estimated and maintained?

Model-based monitoring and management of distributed treatment systems (DSyM)

The costs of uncertainty

Network condition simulator for benchmarking sewer deterioration models

Network Condition Simulator

The aim of this project is to gain more insight about sustainable infrastructure management and to develop tools and methods for complex decision making for infrastructure planning.

Sustainable Network Infrastructure Planning (SNIP)

Development of systematic but generic methods for the generation of locally appropriate sanitation system options and for the quantification of sustainability performance indicators.

Generation and Assessment of Sanitation Systems for Strategic Planning (GRASP)

Managing Uncertainty in the Design of Urban Water Infrastructure

Design of urban water infrastructure

Project aim is participative decision support for the long-term transition to innovative wastewater infrastructures.

Decision-making for wastewater infrastructure transitions

We aim at facilitating the use of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis in urban water management practice.

Value-focused wastewater infrastructure planning

Photo: Max Maurer/Eawag

We are identifying the challenges of modular infrastructure systems for the Swiss economy and society using the example of urban water management.

COMIX: Challenges and Opportunities of Modular water Infrastructures

Decentralisation changes wastewater quantity and quality that is discharged to the sewer. We investigate the effects of these changes on the operation of existing centralised sewer systems.

Transition to decentralised wastewater treatment systems - its effects on the operation of sewers

We quantify the physical disintegration of faeces in sewers - a stochastic detrition model is developed and calibrated by flow reactor experiments using PIV and image analysis backlight illumination

Physical disintegration of faeces in sewers

The ‘Transitions Pathways Generator’ (TPG) model aims at the systematic generation of transition pathways describing technical adaptations of the urban drainage infrastructure.

Urban Water Infrastructure Transition Pathways Generator (TPG)

Improving the environmental benefits of green roofs through system focused experiments and modeling

Multi-functional green roofs

Urban Blue-Green Infrastructures for Biodiversity

Connect-HDL

How to design blue-green infrastructure to enhance urban biodiversity?

Benefit

monitor the impact of urbanization and prepare for an urban living lab

BGB Living Lab Bern

COMCORDE - Reducing Uncertainties in Urban Drainage Simulations

Quantifying micropollutant loads in combined and separate sewer overflows

DIMES II

Estimating public health factors at the community level

Wastewater-based epidemiology

Mapping environmental variables in sewers

TransDrugS

Advancing estimation of illicit drug use from wastewater samples - the role of in-sewer drug transformation.

SEWPROF

High resolution mass spectrometry in the field

MS2field

Input of plant protection products into surface waters in rural landscapes: What is the relevance of hydraulic shortcuts ?

Shortcut

Application of Wastewater-based Epidemiology to SARS-CoV-2 Detection

SARS-CoV2 in Wastewater

Measuring micropollutants in combined sewer overflows with mobile HRMS

mikroMISCH

Analysis of human excretion products in wastewater as additional, independent indicators for the assessment of epidemiological information

DroMedArio

Commercial Microwave links for Urban Rainfall Monitoring (CoMMon)

Urban Rainfall Monitoring

COMCORDE - Reducing Uncertainties in Urban Drainage Simulations

Kanalnetzbewirtschaftung für besseren Gewässerschutz

INKA

Assessing influence of model structure deficiencies & input errors on the uncertainty of model prediction

QUICS

Hexagonal Grids for urban flood modelling

HexCADDIES

Cost Effective Neural Technique to Alleviate Urban flood Risk

Centaur

Software tools for hexagonal grids

HexUtils

Urban flood experiments and alternative data acquisition methods

FloodX

Is your computer model too slow? Use emulators to speed it up!

EMUmore

Alternative data collection and assimilation methods for urban flood modelling

FLOODvision

What are the biggest obstacles to a better surface water protection during wet-weather?

POLAAR

We automate tedious evaluations with big-data methods and create the basis for faster and better decisions

Virtual employees assisted sewer management

Smart monitoring, data sharing and offering transnational access to lab and field facilities to the European Urban Drainage community.

CoUDLabs

PhD project to develop a new type of sensors based on UV/visible spectroscopy, that will allow real time, non-intrusive and low maintenance monitoring of the COD and turbidity of sewers.

Non-contact UV/vis monitoring of sewer

The Urban Water Observatory (UWO) is a long-term (5-year) initiative of ETH and Eawag to establish a sensor network in Fehraltorf...

UWO - Urban Water Observatory

Development of self-powered sensored pipes for smart management of water distribution systems

Smart Water Pipes (2020-)

In-Sewer LPWAN - A new LoRa-based synchronous mesh network to help monitoring in-sewer processes

In-Sewer LPWAN

Harvesting Stormwater for Cooling Urban Areas

StormHeatX (2020 - 2022)