Introduction
In the cross-cutting topic "Technologies and processes", as decided at the first digital meeting in January 2022 after presentation of the projects, the focus was initially placed on the development of a procedure overview. In this overview, the technologies and procedures developed and investigated in the various projects of the WavE II funding measure were categorized and briefly described in terms of the treatment objective. For the categorization, the three subject areas of the funding measure agricultural irrigation, industrial water and saline water were distinguished. Furthermore, an allocation to superordinate process categories such as physical, chemical, biological processes as well as special categories for membrane processes, electrically driven desalination processes and disinfection is carried out. The Excel table for the process overview also contains information on the integration of individual processes in process combinations. The overall treatment objectives pursued in the projects are also indicated.
Activities and results to date
Building on the process overview, there will continue to be an exchange of information on the characterization methods used for the technologies. During a joint meeting of the cross-sectional topic group "Technologies and Processes" together with "Implementation of Projects - Agricultural Irrigation Group" in July 2022, the activities for the unified assessment of technologies during the funding measure WavE were presented and discussed. The discussion showed that the direct adoption of the developed criteria and parameters is not or only partly intended. Rather, a more in-depth consideration of the processes in the three WavE topic areas appears to be useful, since different target criteria for the use cases result.
In the topic area "Reuse of treated municipal wastewater", for example, the requirements from the implementation of the European minimum requirements for agricultural reuse (EU 2020/74) are very decisive. During the workshop of the cross-cutting topic "Implementation of projects - Agricultural irrigation" in November 2022, the elaborated procedure overview was also presented.
In the topics concerning industrial and saline waters, the focus was placed on (membrane-based) selective desalination and the process overview was supplemented with further information to be queried, e.g. on the concentrations as multiples of the seawater concentration (standard definition 35 g/L).
It also became apparent that there was a great deal of interest in the topic of "utilization of concentrates", for which a separate group met in mid-October. Here, the process overview was supplemented with regard to specific questions on concentrates.
Outlook
After the determination of further important parameters (concerning desalination and concentrates), a new survey was started with the aim to obtain more information on the already compiled technologies enabling water reuse, recirculation etc. in the WavE II projects. Among others, the survey refers to salt concentrations in feed/permeate/concentrate, removed groups of substances, interfering substances, etc..
In the topic area "Reuse of treated municipal wastewater", there is further cooperation with the cross-cutting topic "Project implementation", e.g. on the topic of validation requirements for the technologies.
