Hydro International
Heavy rainfall washes urban pollutants into British rivers, prompting Hydro International and the University of Sheffield to collaborate on a sensor system for manholes to measure captured contaminants.
Heavy rain in towns and cities across Britain doesn’t just create the risk of flooding, it can make matters even worse by washing urban pollution – worn down tyre rubber, microplastics, heavy metals and other traffic residue – into our streams and rivers.
Water engineers at Hydro International developed a system to trap these pollutants, and had a plan to create a sensor which could fit under manhole covers and measure the amount of pollutants being caught. They asked the University of Sheffield to help.
Hydro associate technical director Daniel Jarman said: “When it's a higher risk project, and we ultimately don't have the expertise, we'll reach out and partner with a university, and the Knowledge Transfer Partnership scheme at Sheffield was a good mechanism to do that.”
The even bigger attraction of working with the University of Sheffield was its worldwide reputation for water engineering and its specific experience of developing the kind of sensor which, Hydro knew, could ultimately be a gamechanger by alerting the owners of roads and car parks when the drain interceptors that sit under their manhole covers are too clogged up with sediment to keep filtering the pollutants carried by stormwater.
Senior University of Sheffield Water Engineering Lecturer Andy Nichols said: “It’s great when engineers of different disciplines get together to solve problems - I always like the challenge of ‘how can we measure something that we can’t measure right now?’.
“in this case I had already developed a prototype sensor which could measure the levels of water and sediment in a system at the same time but, in a way, it was a solution looking for a problem. It sat on the shelf for a while and then Dan and I crossed paths.”
Hydro’s ambition was to develop a sensor which exceeded basic maintenance requirements by identifying the makeup of the stormwater pollutants and posting the data back to a Hydro cloud.
Andy said: “Often maintenance happens when the system fails, which is quite reactive and not the situation you want to be in. The alternative is regular inspections which are costly, especially if you're emptying it when it's only half full or quarter full.”
Bristol-based Daniel, who runs Hydro’s UK-based product development team, said: “I can’t remember how I got in touch with Andy but the device, or the intellectual property that they had developed, came up in conversation, and we said we'd like to give it a try. That potentially gave us a richer picture in terms of what the maintenance requirements were and what pollutants were being captured.
“The idea was to fit and develop sensors to these pollution control devices and carry out maintenance more proactively.
“So, we could tell the owner: ‘Your sediment capture device is 75% full, you need to go and empty it’.
“It would mean cost savings for the owners by carrying out the maintenance when it's necessary, not just periodically. It also means that you're preventing risk of pollution events.”
Working with the University helped Hydro develop new expertise, but the impact of the pandemic meant that the sensor project didn’t reach the intended conclusion - but Daniel has not abandoned his ambitions.
He said: “We wanted to deliver a field deployable prototype for this sensor. I wish we'd got further with it because I still believe in it. In the meantime, we're launching our own product, a sensor that we have developed in-house and we need to test that in the market. I expect we're two, three years away from doing something else.”
Andy, too, hopes Hydro can realise its ambitions. “I like to do research that I could see having an impact on the real world in my lifetime - if not in the next few years. I like to be at that end of things where we're trying to come up with solutions to problems that the industry has. It's really important.”
He added: “Business and academia are a good match. We influence each other in good ways. Initiatives like Innovate UK’s KTP projects are great because we get to do interesting research, while the company benefits too.”