Project Portugal 2030

Summary

Important challenge: Climate change, increasing water scarcity, population growth, demographic changes and urbanization already pose challenges for water supply systems. This project addresses this challenge. The main focus is to produce a component with appropriate design and materials that is effective in removing contaminants, such as metals and dyes, from water. Production with affordable and user-friendly technology will allow for an intelligent and sustainable use of water with social impact at a regional, national and global level. The intention is to reduce the amount of used water and reutilize the water for other applications, such as agriculture. Re-use of wastewater to recover water is becoming an important strategy to increase food production, increased resilience to water and greater circularity in the economy. Ambitious objectives: These ambitious objectives will be achieved through the development across disciplines thanks to a multi and interdisciplinary team of Mechanical Engineers, Materials Engineers, Biochemistry and Microbiologists. The optimization of the device will be made by numeric simulation, considering the real value of the properties of the materials tested after 3D printed (3DP) test specimens. After the device is optimized it will be produced by choosing the widest spread and cheapest 3DP technologies (Fused Filament Fabrication – FFF and Stereolithography - SLA) aiming that everyone, specially those in water stressed areas, can make their one device. 3DP is considered as a remarkable strategy to improve the overall efficiency of the current approaches [2]. In this projects we intend to address the challenges (such as standardized materials & technologies) but specially the opportunities (new materials & designs and scalability & sustainability) given by the 3DP combined with a computational simulation optimization that allows to reduce time and costs related to the try and error approach of the solely experimental approach. Moreover, the approach will go beyond the state of the art due to the COMBINED knowledge of the team experts. In fact, most of the literature present studies that only use one approach to the subject; either the materials composition [3], or the design [4], or the ability to reduce (or not) the formation of a bacterial biofilm [5]. The team has already proved the expertise in the 3DP area [6] as well as in the researchers’ collaboration between the different areas, including 3DP and numerical simulation [7].