€5.1M Horizon 2020 project to build collaborative Urban Drainage research communities

A new project will integrate research and innovation activities in the field of Urban Drainage Systems to address pressing public health and flood risks, and emerging environmental challenges.

water research

The University of Sheffield is taking part in a new €5.1 million Horizon 2020 project that aims to integrate research and innovation activities in the field of Urban Drainage Systems (UDS) to address pressing public health and flood risks, and emerging environmental challenges.

The EU’s Urban Drainage Systems (UDS) have been valued at €2.5 trillion. They are essential infrastructure providing safe sanitation and drainage to communities and environmental protection to natural water bodies.  Many UDS are at risk, their operational performance  is declining, and it is unclear how limited knowledge on their state and issues such as population growth, the climate emergency, untreated stormwater and public health threats caused by emerging pollutants and pathogens can be addressed, and how new knowledge, innovations and best practice is effectively shared. Innovative approaches are urgently needed to tackle these challenges, and large scale laboratory facilities are essential to investigate and validate new approaches and provide confidence in their effectiveness and safety before implementation in existing UDS.

Co-UDlabs (Building Collaborative Urban Drainage research labs communities) is a four-year project bringing together 17 large-scale urban drainage experimental facilities located at seven research organisations in Europe: University of Sheffield (UK), University of A Coruña (Spain), INSA Lyon (France), Aalborg University (Denmark), Deltares (Netherlands), EAWAG (Switzerland) and IKT (Germany). The experimental facilities are designed for research across a range of applications, including urban flooding, runoff pollution, physico-chemical and biological in-sewer process, sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS), performance analysis of urban assets, real time control and asset deterioration. 

Dr Alma Schellart, Senior Lecturer in Water Engineering in the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering commented: “The University of Sheffield is delighted to be part of this important opportunity to co-create better innovative products tested at the full-scale level, supporting the EU’s drive to deliver a more knowledge-based economy as well as improving performance of its own urban water infrastructure.”  

Simon Tait, Professor of Water Engineering added: “Here at Sheffield our researchers are collaborating on several elements of the wider project but principally, are leading the WP7, activity on evaluating asset deterioration in urban drainage systems.  This involves determining how to get, use and improve pipe inspection data, developing failure scenarios for defects, and applying proposed defect deterioration models to real systems.”

The University of Sheffield is also offering transnational access to laboratory facilities as an important part of this project.  This means that other researchers can apply through CO-UDLabs to visit the University for collaborative research using Sheffield’s unique facilities.

More information is available on the project website https://co-udlabs.eu/ and social channels @CoUDlabs on Twitter or Co-UDlabs on LinkedIn. 

The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101008626”.

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