05-03-2015
The WEX Award 2015 - Water and Energy, given in Istanbul to the application submitted by “Águas de Portugal” (AdP), was based on a network research project supported by several companies of AdP’s Group, as well by a number of higher education institutions including FCT / UNL, here represented by Professor Leonor Amaral (Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering) and by the student Peter Sequeira Pinto.
The goal of this project, based on models inspired in the human brain, was to increase and to optimize the production of energy from biogas resulting from the anaerobic digestion process of sludge produced in Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTP). Entitled "Neural AD (Anaerobic Digestion Neural Networks +)," the study achieved victory in the category "Water and Energy" of the 2015 edition of the WEX Global Awards, given annually in the international conference “Water and Energy Exchange (WEX) Global”. This year’s edition of WEX Awards took place from 23 to February 25 in Istanbul, Turkey, under the theme "Water, Energy, and the Zero Waste Society".
This project was initially developed by Simria and AdP Services, companies from the “Águas de Portugal” Group, together with the Engineering Institute of Porto (ISEP). Given the achieved results, in 2014 joined the project other companies from the AdP Group, dealing with sanitation systems operation (Simarsul, Simtejo, Sanest and Northwest Waters), and other higher education institutions: the Technical Institute from the University of Lisbon, the Faculty of Science and Technology from the New University of Lisbon and the University of Minho.
At this point, the project is under development in six WWTP from Águas de Portugal Group - Wastewater Treatment Plant Ave (Vila do Conde), North WWTP (Aveiro), South WWTP (Aveiro), WWTP Vila Franca (VF Xira), WWTP Seixal (Seixal) and WWTP Guide (Cascais).
