Manel Poch

University of Girona | UDG · LEQUIA Laboratory of Chemical and Environmental Engineering

Water pricing is an economic instrument traditionally used to reduce water demand. However, its effective implementation requires knowledge of the extent to which users reduce water consumption with increasing water prices. The price elasticity of water demand has been estimated using econometric regression, which relies on cross-sectional and time...

Climate change severely affects urban water systems (UWSs). Infrastructure historically designed for milder conditions cannot manage growing water demands and extreme events. To obtain a resilient water sector, adaptation and mitigation strategies must address rising water challenges while striving for net-zero emissions. Researchers have noted tha...

In the context of climate change and increasing water scarcity, adopting water demand-side management (DSM)policies has become necessary. This study advocates for utilizing agent-based modelling (ABM) as a robustsimulation tool to assess the impact of nonprice (nudges) and price (changes in increasing block tariff) measureson urban water use. Overc...

The imperative to make energy and resource consumption more sustainable is prompting a critical reconsideration of all human endeavors. Within urban water management, the drive to enhance sustainability is grounded in the recognition that water services consume a substantial amount of energy and that wastewater contains valuable resources, includin...

The research in urban water management, especially in the Global North, has so far been predominantly driven by the pursuit of technological innovation, with the overarching goal of managing demand and supply of the resource, seeking cost efficiency, quality and sustainability standards. Thus, the urban water cycle has been envisioned and shaped by...

In high-rate activated sludge (HRAS) processes, reducing the solid retention time (SRT) minimizes COD oxidation and allows to obtain the maximum energy recovery. The aim of this research was to operate a pilot plant with an automatic control strategy to assure the HRAS process stability and high COD fractions removal at very low SRT. This study com...

Designing and implementing innovative and effective policies to reduce domestic water demand is vital to enhance sustainability of cities. Past research has shown that Time-of-Use Tariffs (TOUT) is a powerful tool to reduce water consumption in urban settings. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of this dynamic water pricing approach might be influence...

Water systems need to become more locally robust and sustainable in view of increased population demands and supply uncertainties. Decentralized treatment is often assumed to have the potential to improve the technical, environmental, and economic performance of current technologies. The techno-economic feasibility of implementing independent build...

The development and application of new forms of automation and monitoring, data mining, and the use of AI data sources and knowledge management tools in the water sector has been compared to a ‘digital revolution’. The state-of-the-art literature has analysed this transformation from predominantly technical and positive perspectives, emphasising th...

Coagulation is the main process for removing natural organic matter (NOM), considered to be the major disinfection by-products (DBPs) precursor in drinking water production. In this work, k-means clusters analysis were used to classify influent waters from two different surface drinking water treatment plants (DWTPs) located in the Mediterranean re...

Water managers have to deal with complex problems due to the intertwined characteristics of processes, in particular those that occur in wastewater systems. Existing modelling approaches are usually centred in the physical, chemical and biological aspects of the individual processes, excluding the social and organisational context that will generat...

In this paper, we present an agent-based model for exploring the interplay of basic structural and socio-cognitive factors and conventional water saving measures in the evolution of domestic water use in metropolitan areas. Using data of Barcelona, we discuss three scenarios that involve plausible demographic and cultural trends. Results show that,...

Drinking water treatment plants (DWTPs) face changes in raw water quality, which affect the formation of disinfection by-products. Several empirical modelling approaches have been reported in the literature, but most of them have been developed with lab-scale data, which may not be representative of real water systems. Therefore, the application of...

Perello-Moragues, AntoniNoriega, PabloPopartan, Lucia AlexandraPoch, ManelThe use of agent-based social simulation for policy-making involves ethical considerations of three different kinds: (i) in the agent-based policy model itself: the choice of values that are to be imbued in the simulated agents and in the policies; (ii) in the functionality o...

In this paper, we propose to enrich standard agent-based social simulation for policy-making with affordances inspired by second-order emergent social phenomena. Namely, we explore the inclusion of agents who have means to perceive, aggregate and respond to emergent collective outcomes, for example by promoting some reaction in other agents. These...

Drinking water treatment plants (DWTPs) have to be efficiently managed to produce safe water at all times, independently from variations of influent water quality. Artificial Intelligence techniques like fuzzy inference systems (FIS) can help in consolidating process knowledge accumulated through years of experience and improve the consistency and...

Drinking water production is subject to multiple water quality requirements such as minimizing disinfection byproducts (DBPs) formation, which are highly related to natural organic matter (NOM) content. For water treatment, coagulation is a key process for removing water pollutants and, as such, is widely implemented in drinking water treatment pla...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is, undeniably, a substantial shock to our civilization which has revealed the value of public services that relate to public health. Ensuring a safe and reliable water supply and maintaining water sanitation has become ever more critical during the pandemic. For this reason, researchers and practitioners have promptly...

The management of wastewater systems constitutes a complex problem in the environmental engineering field. The variability and uncertainty of the inflows of wastewater treatment plants involve a real risk of reducing the effectiveness of the treatments and worsen the ecological state of river basins. An adequate reduction of contaminants requires a...

Evaluating the sustainability of wastewater management alternatives is a challenging task. This paper proposes an innovative methodology to assess and compare the sustainability of four wastewater management alternatives: a) centralised water resource recovery facility (WRRF) based on activated sludge (AS); b) centralised WRRF with membrane bioreac...

Drinking Water Treatment Plants (DWTPs) face changes in raw water quality and treatment needs to be adjusted to produce the best water quality at the minimum environmental cost. An environmental decision support system (EDSS) was developed for aiding DWTP operators in choosing the adequate permanganate dosing rate in the pre-oxidation step. To this...

The so-called fourth revolution in the water sector will encounter the Big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution. The current data surplus stemming from all types of devices together with the relentless increase in computer capacity is revolutionizing almost all existing sectors, and the water sector will not be an exception. Combining t...

Biogas production is a growing market and the existing conversion technologies require different biogas quality and characteristics. In pursuance of assisting decision-makers in biogas upgrading an environmental decision support system (EDSS) was developed. Since the field is rapidly progressing, this tool is easily updatable with new data from tec...

Drinking Water Treatment Plants face changes in raw water quality and quantity and the treatment needs to be adjusted accordingly to produce the best water quality at the minimum environmental cost. The amount of data generated along drinking water treatment plants allows developing data-based models like artificial neural networks that are able to...

The existing wastewater treatment infrastructure has not adequately established an efficient and sustainable use of energy, water, and nutrients. A proposed scheme based on source separation and water-efficient use is compared to the current wastewater management paradigm (one largely based on activated sludge) using techno-economic terms. This pap...

Climate change and socioeconomic factors have increased the complexity of urban water supply systems. Thus, fresh water sources are being gradually diversified to improve the reliability and resilience of the systems. However, as the number of source blending options grows, optimization tools are needed to design drinking water supply systems that...

The aim of this paper is to describe the state-of-the art computer-based techniques for data analysis to improve operation of wastewater treatment plants. A comprehensive review of peer-reviewed papers shows that European researchers have led academic computer-based method development during the last two decades. The most cited techniques are artif...

The aim of this work is to quantify the relative contribution to the overall environmental impact of the construction phase compared to the operational phase for a large conventional activated sludge wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). To estimate these environmental impacts, a systematic procedure was designed to obtain the detailed Life Cycle Inve...

The growing development of technologies and processes for resource treatment and recovery is offering endless possibilities for creating new plant-wide configurations or modifying existing ones. However, the configurations’ complexity, the interrelation between technologies and the influent characteristics turn decision-making into a complex or uno...

Environmental decision support systems (EDSSs) are attractive tools to cope with the complexity of environmental global challenges. Several thoughtful reviews have analyzed EDSSs to identify the key challenges and best practices for their development. One of the major criticisms is that a wide and generalized use of deployed EDSSs has not been obse...

This paper characterizes part of an interdisciplinary research effort on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and tools applied to Environmental Decision-Support Systems (EDSS). WaWO+ the ontology we present here, provides a set of concepts that are queried, advertised and used to support reasoning about and the management of urban water resourc...

Nowadays, most industries are required by law to treat their wastewater, but the selection of the most appropriate wastewater treatment technologies involves a complex decision making process. Environmental decision support systems can be useful to reduce the time needed to make decisions, to improve the consistency and quality of the decisions and...

Greywater is an important alternative water source, particularly in semi-arid, touristic areas, where the biggest water demand is usually in the dry period. By using this source wisely, tourist facilities can substantially reduce the pressure to scarce water resources. In densely urbanized touristic areas, where space has high value, compact soluti...

Wastewater management is a complex task involving a wide range of technical environmental and social factors. Furthermore, it typically requires the coordination of a heterogeneous society of actors with different goals. Regulations and protocols can be effectively used to tackle this complexity. In this chapter we present a norm-aware multi-agent...

This paper compares two calibration approaches to enhance the ability of hydrodynamic models to describe the performance of combined sewer overflow (CSO) structures. One approach is based on the duration of CSO events (monitored by low-cost sensors) and the other focuses on the overflow volume. Both were applied to the West-Graz catchment model to...

Wastewater treatment selection is a complex task usually addressed by applying separate tools for the correct assessment of multi-criteria evaluation. Novedar_EDSS integrates technical, environmental, economic and social assessment capabilities in one single platform. The aim of this work is to evaluate and demonstrate the capabilities of this envi...

The increasing demand on wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) has involved an interest in improving the alternative treatment selection process. In this study, an integrated framework including an intelligent knowledge-based system and superstructure-based optimization has been developed and applied to a real case study. Hence, a multi-criteria anal...

Wastewater treatment systems (WTSs) have as an objective to efficiently treat the wastewater flows that they receive. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) process optimization is generally based on biological process optimization, which is usually related to the quantity and quality of the WWTP inflows. The inflow contributions sometimes destabilize...

Optimal management is usually at the top of the concerns in the context of water infrastructures. In the specific domain of wastewater treatment plants, the problem is deeper. European Directive 91/271 established the necessity for the biological treatment of wastewater and implied an intensive process of construction of Wastewater Treatment Plants...

Stricter regulations in the field of sanitation are driving new dimensions of analysis, in which socioeconomic criteria combined with associated environmental issues are in turn increasing the complexity of wastewater management. In this environment, the development of innovative wastewater treatment technologies provides decision-makers with many...

Pharmaceuticals are designed to improve human and animal health, but may also be a threat to freshwater ecosystems, particularly after receiving urban or wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluents. Knowledge on the fate and attenuation of pharmaceuticals in engineered and natural ecosystems is rather fragmented, and comparable methods are needed t...

There is concern about the environmental effects of pharmaceuticals, since these substances have strong biological impacts and are found in an increasing number of sites, especially downstream from wastewater treatment plants (WWTP). Most information existing on the effects of pharmaceutical products is based on simple laboratory assays with single...

In wastewater systems, the efficiency of the treatment process is strongly related to the composition of its influent. When the treatment is overloaded (in volume and/or pollutants), its efficiency decreases and the effluent cannot attain the quality required by the receiving waters. This work considers the problem of mixing multiple wastewater str...

Model-based explorations are a very useful tool for the fast and rigorous assessment of any new wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) layout, and especially suitable in the preliminary analysis of the interrelations among leading-edge technologies and the other processes of the plant. This abstract presents the usefulness of mathematical models and sim...

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) play an important role within the urban water cycle in protecting receiving waters from untreated discharges. However, WWTPs processes also affect the environment. Life cycle assessment has traditionally been used to assess the impact of direct discharges from WWTPs and indirect emissions related to energy or che...

A continuous, on-line quantification of the nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from a full-scale sequencing batch reactor (SBR) placed in a municipal wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) was performed in this study. In general, N2O emissions from the biological wastewater treatment system were 97.1 ± 6.9 g N2O–N/Kg consumed or 6.8% of the influent load. In...

This paper explores the potential of integrated management of neighboring wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The novelty lies in the integration of environmental aspects, with the application of life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, together with economic criteria for the selection of best alternatives. A case study illustrates how the connect...

Using low-cost sensors, data can be collected on the occurrence and duration of overflows in each combined sewer overflow (CSO) structure in a combined sewer system (CSS). The collection and analysis of real data can be used to assess, improve, and maintain CSSs in order to reduce the number and impact of overflows. The objective of this study was...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodology to generate environmental impact estimates associated with the life cycle stages of a product or process. The approach facilitates a more comprehensive outlook of the end-of-pipe process impacts, in which wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are included. Here we describe the implementation of the LCA met...

The first flush effect in combined sewer systems during storm events often causes overflows and overloads of the sewage treatment, which reduces the efficiency of the sewage treatment and decreases the quality of the receiving waters due to the pollutants that are contributed. The use of retention tanks constitutes a widely used way to mitigate thi...

A model-based tool developed with the aim to evaluate wastewater treatment control strategies based on real energy tariffs structure is presented. To demonstrate the usefulness of the tool, different strategies are evaluated based on: i) variable ammonium (N-NH 4 +) set-point depending on the tariff period, and ii) influent load control, by filling...

A new model was developed in order to simulate the most significant arsenic retention processes that take place in constructed wetlands (CWs) treating high arsenic waters. The present contribution presents the implementation phases related to plants (arsenic uptake and accumulation, root arsenic adsorption, and root oxygen release), showing the fir...

Combined sewer overflow (CSO) events produced in combined sewer systems (CSS) during wet weather conditions are a threat for the receiving water bodies. The large number of CSO structures normally present in a CSS makes that the monitoring of the complete CSO network in a simultaneous way would drastically increase the investment costs. In this pap...

A simulation procedure for the optimization of enzymatic reactors used in sandwich flow injection systems is evaluated. The system is modeled as a plug-flow reactor with axial dispersion. To calibrate it, dispersion coefficients can be evaluated using residence time distribution techniques; meanwhile, enzymatic kinetics must be determined for the s...

Abstract The results obtained in the design and calibration of a deterministic water quality model from the Llobregat River (Spain) are presented. The water quality indicators studied are dissolved oxygen, biochemical oxygen demand, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, phosphate, and heterotrophic bacteria. The factors which describe the rates of the transfo...

In the last decade the political awareness of river water quality issues has grown substantially over the world and legislation is accordingly adapting. In the European Union (EU), two different directives regulate separately the characteristics of the discharged water and the chemical status of the receiving freshwater ecosystem. On the one hand,...

The use of Horizontal Subsurface Constructed Wetlands (HSCWs) for treating wastewaters in small communities has increased in the last years due to HSCW's ecological singularities. Unfortunately, the same singularities that differentiate HSCWs complicate any attempt to develop models and produce generic decision-support systems for them. Classical m...

The effectiveness of wastewater systems with high-industrial effluent input requires avoiding temporary overloads due to influent volumes and/or pollutant loads that exceed the system's treatment capacity. The multiagent paradigm is shown to be a suitable methodology for managing all information related to the state of the entire system to apply op...

In light of rapid global change, the demand for wastewater treatment is increasing rapidly and will continue to do so in the near future. Wastewater management is a complex puzzle for which the proper pieces must be combined to achieve the desired solution, requiring the simultaneous consideration of technical, economic, social and environmental is...

The distinctive characteristics of nanoparticles, resulting from properties that arise at the nano-scale, underlie their potential applications in the biomedical sector. However, the very same characteristics also result in widespread concerns about the potentially toxic effects of nanoparticles. Given the large number of nanoparticles that are bei...

The current complexity involved in wastewater management projects is arising as the XXI century sets new challenges leading towards a more integrated plant design. In this context, the growing number of innovative technologies, stricter legislation and the development of new methodological approaches make it difficult to design appropriate flow sch...

The preliminary design and economic assessment of small wastewater treatment plants (less than 2000 population equivalent) are issues of particular interest since wastewaters from most of these agglomerations are not covered yet. This work aims to assess nine different technologies set-up for the secondary treatment in such type of facilities embra...

The daily operation of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in unitary sewer systems of industrialized areas is of special concern. Severe problems can occur due to the characteristics of incoming flow. In order to avoid decision that leads to hazardous situations, guidelines and regulations exist. However, there are still no golden standards by whi...

The main goal of the Water Framework Directive is to achieve good chemical and ecological status of water bodies by 2015. The implementation of integrated river basin management, including sewer systems, wastewater treatment plants and receiving water bodies, is essential to accomplishing this objective. Integrated management is complex and therefo...

In this work we explore the reactivity induced by coordination of a CO molecule trans to the Ru-benzylidene bond of a prototype Ru-olefin metathesis catalyst bearing the N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) ligand SIMes. Static DFT calculations indicate that CO binding to the Ru center promotes a cascade of reactions with very low energy barriers that lead...

The use of knowledge-based systems has been shown to be a suitable approach to support decision making in environmental systems. Capturing and managing the huge quantity of data/information that has to be considered is an intrinsic factor that makes environmental systems a sophisticated domain. Organizing this data in a naive way can impact the eff...

This work is motivated by the difficulty of representing Environmental domains in a functional way. We present a formalization approach covering both environmental and computational needs. It allows us to produce an operational software for intelligent decision support on a Horizontal Subsurface Constructed Wetlands (HSCW) while capturing the most...

Extended abstract The implementation of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD, 2000/60/EC) is shifting the traditional unconnected management of urban water systems (UWS) components (sewer systems, wastewater treatment plants and receiving waters), evolving towards a river-basin scale integrated management concept. Thus the development of a d...

Many processes from chemical industries generate wastewater discharges with acidic or alkaline character.These type of discharges often need a neutralization process before their incorporation into the receiving media. This process is complex: it presents many difficulties due to the none-linear response of pH value to the addition of acids or base...

The performance and reliability of the CWM1-RETRASO model for simulating processes in horizontal subsurface flow constructed wetlands (HSSF CWs) and the relative contribution of different microbial reactions to organic matter (COD) removal in a HSSF CW treating urban wastewater were evaluated. Various different approaches with diverse influent conf...

The integrated management of the Urban Wastewater System (UWS) involves to deal with a high level of complexity. This complexity is a result of the need to reach the UWS global goal (i.e. to discharge wastewater with an appropriate quality into the receiving media) and, at the same time, the requirements from the particular dynamics and interaction...