Eawag - Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology

The Urban Water Management department projects align with three research themes, enriched by Living Labs:

Systems Transformation (Tove Larsen, Max Maurer, João Leitão, Lauren Cook) combines approaches and engineering options to transform today’s urban water infrastructure into multifunctional, sustainable systems.

Source Typing and Tracking (Christoph Ort, Jörg Rieckermann) identifies pollutant and pathogen origins and evaluates their fate within wastewater systems (e.g. combined sewer overflows and wastewater-based epidemiology).

Intelligent Network Operations (Jörg Rieckermann, João Leitão) aims to improve operation of wastewater systems through innovative models and measurement techniques to assess pollutant fluxes and urban flood risk.

Urban Living Labs (Max Maurer) are real-world example sites where we test innovative technologies and collect data to advance the three research areas and facilitate transfer into practice.

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

Benefit: Blue-green Infrastructure meets biodiversity in the city

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)

Managing Uncertainty in the Design of Urban Water Infrastructure

Design of urban water infrastructure

Urban Blue-Green Infrastructures for Biodiversity

Connect-HDL

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

Decision-making for wastewater infrastructure transitions

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

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

Integrated, engineering design and decision support strategies for BGI at the neighborhood scale to address stormwater management, heat mitigation, and biodiversity enhancement in a current and future climate.

BETTER: Design and decision-making for blue-green infrastructure

Future synthetic rainfall time series for Switzerland in high spatial and temporal resolution

Future Rainfall

Measuring micropollutants in combined sewer overflows with mobile HRMS

mikroMISCH

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

SARS-CoV2 in Wastewater

Mapping environmental variables in sewers

TransDrugS

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

Shortcut

Estimating public health factors at the community level

Wastewater-based epidemiology

High resolution mass spectrometry in the field

MS2field

Hexagonal Grids for urban flood modelling

HexCADDIES

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

CoUDLabs

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

Virtual employees assisted sewer management

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

POLAAR

Software tools for hexagonal grids

HexUtils

Approach to sedimentation in sewer and urban drainage systems based on temperature measurements

SedTemp

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-)

Harvesting Stormwater for Cooling Urban Areas

StormHeatX (2020 - 2022)

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

BGB Living Lab Bern

Network condition simulator for benchmarking sewer deterioration models

Network Condition Simulator

The costs of uncertainty

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)

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

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

Value-focused wastewater infrastructure planning

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)

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