Grant: College and Community Innovation Program

There is a growing provincial and federal interest as discussed in the Federal and Ontario Innovation Agendas in the improvement, development and commercialization of water and waste water treatment technologies and systems; both for municipal and industrial applications. Saturation of existing treatment facilities, high labour cost, especially at remote locations, as well as low treatment efficiency, high land-use footprint, and high energy requirements for conventional systems are the main challenges which are expected to be investigated and solved by new and improved systems. The Lambton Water Centre (LWC) project will increase the capacity for Lambton College and its industrial, municipal and government partners to conduct applied research in the area of wastewater, water treatment and services. The LWC initiative's overall goals are: i) to design and implement automation, instrumentation, optimization and modeling of new water technology systems to improve their performance, ii) to develop optimal plant design and predictive maintenance/operation scheduling, iii) to develop Remote Facility Management (RFM) systems for water and wastewater plants. In later phases, newly developed advanced water quality sensor integration, extraction of valuable compounds before treatment, and design of customized advanced training tools will be investigated. LWC will provide cost effective options to municipalities and industry for the optimization of existing and new plants. The LWC will benefit from close partnerships with companies and organizations in the water and wastewater value chain including municipalities, manufacturers, operators, consultants, first nation andaboriginal organizations, universities, especially the Southern Ontario Water Consortium (SOWC) and London Wastewater Facility (LWF). The LWC initiative will stimulate economic development through technology transfer to the partners, local and regional SME's as well as municipalities, and will allow the Sarnia-Lambton region to exploit this global opportunity.