The University of Arizona has been awarded up to $10 million for research into improving water safety and recycling technologies. This is the single largest grant for water use research in the university’s history.
Universities in Southern California and Nevada will each also receive up to $10 million in funding from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Research and Development Center.
Together, the three institutions have established the Drinking Water Reuse Consortium, a joint research partnership to address the pressing water shortages in the Southwest. The grant was announced last week.
UA will focus on how to sustainably treat water from various contaminants until it is drinkable.
“We are generally under a lot of resource stress, and we live in such an extreme environment, so we have to be really smart and strategic about how we use all of our resources,” said Professor Kelly Hickenbottom, one of the study’s lead investigators. “We are always thinking about how we can minimize our water usage.”
The region is facing a historic water crisis and an even more severe drought is expected in the near future. Water levels in the Colorado River have already fallen by a third in recent years, and it is estimated that warmer temperatures have evaporated a total of 1.5 billion tons of water from the basin.
The university’s Center for Sustainable Technologies for Water and Energy (WEST) is located at the Pima County wastewater treatment plant, allowing researchers to test new technologies on wastewater before releasing it into the Santa Cruz River.
Another principal investigator, Professor Andrea Achri, moved from Italy to the southwest precisely to study desert water.
“My vision for the future of water reuse is that if we want to make water reusable as potable water, we need to switch from a centralized treatment system (the current practice is to treat all the water in one place and then distribute it) to a decentralized system, closer to the user,” he said.
With the help of artificial intelligence, water can be monitored and treated in-house from building to building without direct human involvement.
“Everyone has a washing machine. We just press a button and it does the job,” said Atiri. The same may apply to water treatment.
“Users don’t have to be water reuse experts,” he said.
Over three phases of research, the team of eight researchers will also investigate how to treat water with sunlight against specific bacteria, how activated charcoal sponges contaminants, how to develop more sensitive tests for water-borne viruses, and how to develop more sustainable electrical methods for producing treatment chemicals.
Hickenbottom focuses on desalination, a notoriously energy-intensive process. She hopes that a trough of solar panels that recover both electricity and heat can provide sustainable energy to remove salt from more water and extract other minerals as fertilizer.
For Atiri and Hickenbottom, it’s the largest grant project they’ve ever worked on, but it still pales in comparison to the university’s spending on optics and space exploration. But because water treatment research is much cheaper, Atiri said the grant will allow academics to hire more researchers to push the research further.
“Our research is not very expensive,” he said. “It’s not rocket science.”
Besides environmental threats, water treatment faces logistical and adoption hurdles, researchers said.
“We need new people in the water sector,” says Atiri. “Every engineering student wants to go into his science with computers instead of wastewater,” he laughs. “strange!”
Sewage is not sexy. It’s also slow.
“Unlike the semiconductor, data and technology industries, in our industry it takes decades before something is actually implemented,” Hickenbottom said.
Part of the grant will go to workforce development at both the research facility and the county treatment plant, Achri said.
Ultimately, researchers said technology alone will not solve Arizona’s water shortages.
“It’s a simple, small part” of the solution, Alchiri said. “The problem is much bigger.”
