Future Wastewater Treatment With Sunlight in Aachen and Beijing?
RWTH’s Institute of Environmental Engineering and the Institute for Environmental Research are testing a new process of oxidative water treatment with German companies AMO GmbH, Coatema GmbH, UMEX GmbH Dresden, and HOLINGER Ingenieure GmbH, as well as a Chinese company based in Beijing – the Beijing Capital Company Ltd.
The aim of the project is to increasingly eliminate so-called organic trace substances, such as medication residues, which are currently not adequately separated in the treatment process. If successful, the coating technology developed in the project, which the partners coined "PEPcat", will enable the subsequent treatment of wastewater using sunlight and thus almost foregoing the need to use energy or chemicals.
In the demonstration project for the investigation of this photocatalysis plasmonically enhanced with sunlight, tests with waste water will take place at the wastewater treatment plants Aachen-Soers and Beijing Dongba. The special feature of the project is the direct implementation of the small-scale research of PEPcat on an industrial production scale. The project participants thank the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research for their support in the funding program "CLIENT II - International Partnerships for Sustainable Innovations".