IWA-LET conference- NUFEB workshop
On Monday, 10th of June the NUFEB group held a workshop at the 16th International Water Association – Leading Edge Conference on Water and Wastewater Technologies, in Edinburgh (https://iwa-let.org/).
The workshop, entitled ‘Frontiers in Engineering Biology: New Paradigms for the Water Industry’, was held in collaboration with Bill Sloan’s group from the University of Glasgow.
Tom Curtis gave the introductory remarks, presenting the rationale behind developing sensible modelling tools and the challenges involved in crossing the scales from genomes to industrial treatment plants. Bill followed by stressing the need to develop process based models which are fast, accurate and that take into account stochastic effects in bacterial systems.
The members of the Modelling team talked about their latest research: the performance and capabilities of the individual based models developed; refining the statistical emulation strategies employed to upscale the individual based models and lastly, how the coupling between the emulator and a CFD model enables the modelling of large-scale systems.
The Glasgow team presented a new intelligent robotic platform developed for more efficient Design of Experiments and a rapid prototyping methodology to study the influence of fluid flow on biofilm development.
NUFEB’s Pilot Plant & Validation team reported on the features of the experimental set-ups put in place to validate modelling results, ranging from the micrometre to the metre scales.
The half-day workshop concluded with a fruitful Q&A session, where audience members from the academic and water sectors quizzed the panellists on possible further applications of the work. The session ended with an impromptu presentation by NUFEB’s Saikat Jana on biofilm rheology and the challenges of including mechanical traits in biofilm models.
Last modified: Tue, 11 Jun 2019 16:17:14 BST