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REMONDIS Aqua Company locations

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REMONDIS Group locations

Discover the world of REMONDIS with its 1,000+ branches and associated companies in more than 30 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

Research & Development

Innovative solutions for those constant challenges

Much of what the future brings comes from us

REMONDIS’ slogan is ‘Working for the future’. This emphasises the company’s primary mission to conserve natural resources and curb climate change. However, it also has a more general implication, i.e. that we are constantly striving to develop solutions for tomorrow’s world. Which is why we spend a great deal of time carrying out research and development work. Our focus here is on action research and developing products and processes that add value to our customers’ operations by making them more efficient and more sustainable. And we are proving to be successful in this area, too – you just have to look at how many of our R&D projects make it to market and end up in our portfolio. Thanks to this work, we are able to repeatedly offer our customers new, innovative opportunities to further modernise their water management systems. At the end of the day, for us development work means recognising where there are operational or practical issues and then developing a solution that we can then pass on to our customers.

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Digital water management

Process optimisation

Our TetraPhos® and REPHOS® phosphorus recovery systems are both perfect examples of research projects that successfully made it from the drawing board to market

The future also means digitisation. And increasingly in water management, too

Compared to other industries such as the energy sector, water management is still pretty much at the beginning as far as digitisation is concerned. This in itself means that there will be some big developments in this area over the coming years. The potential here is huge. It’s hardly surprising then that digitisation is playing a major role in our research and development activities. Much of our work currently focuses on ways of capturing data that can then be combined with digitisation to further improve operations – from early flood warning systems all the way through to complex forecast models in the area of network management.

The Industry 4.0 maturity index

Capturing data is an important milestone on the path towards complex AI solutions

Digital water management – Seeing clearly what had previously been hidden

The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly finding its way into the water management sector and is opening up some completely new opportunities, for example in the area of flood protection. Low power sensors can be used to transmit the water levels of rivers, canals and retention basins to flood management systems in real time. This is a genuine bonus in these times of climate change and ever more frequent heavy rainfall events as these systems help to grow levels of efficiency and safety. Which is why we are committed to driving forward the whole subject of IoT and are constantly looking at new ways to not only make data from networks and other types of infrastructure available but also to visualise this data and make it more generally usable. For example by transferring it into smart models (think ‘digital twin’ here). Tangible results can already be seen at Lake Constance and in Goslar, where we are currently developing IoT systems. By capturing data using a combination of battery-run low power sensors and LoRaWAN® radio technology, these regions are able to operate innovative water management 4.0 systems that are creating a whole host of benefits. The sensors can, for example, permanently monitor and detect when water has been discharged into the sewer network by third parties, helping to save energy and prevent the system from being overloaded. Furthermore, the captured data is perfect for creating hydraulic wastewater models that make it easier to not only maintain established plants and facilities but also to plan new ones.

REMONDIS Aqua is one of the partner institutions working on the ‘Extreme weather management with digital multiscale methods’ project – known simply as EXDIMUM – which is sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research

Developing and optimising industrial wastewater processes

Making the very most of our years of expertise, we are constantly optimising the processes used in the areas of industrial and municipal wastewater treatment and water production. Our experienced plant operations team collaborates closely with our engineering department to continuously develop innovative technology and methods of approach. We primarily focus on optimising energy and material recovery using anaerobic processes (RE2Energy), on biological wastewater treatment (deammonification) as well as on optimising the combination of processes used to close industrial wastewater cycles (Zero Liquid Discharge).

In general, we use all available ways and opportunities to efficiently develop solutions and bring them to market. As a result, we use the know-how of our experts to build and operate pilot and test facilities. What’s more, we also regularly take part in international research projects. Just one example here is the WOW! project which is looking into how raw materials, such as lipids, cellulose and bioplastics, can be recovered from sewage.

Heading towards the bio-electrochemical fuel cell

Our subsidiary EURAWASSER is one of the six partner institutions working on an exciting project focusing on wastewater treatment and the energy transition and this is a great opportunity for us to pass on our expertise in the area of municipal wastewater treatment. The participants are looking to develop a very special type of fuel cell, in which microorganisms act as biocatalysts and produce electricity by breaking down the organic substances in the wastewater. The overall aim of this particular project – which is sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and involves institutions such as the Clausthal University of Technology – is to set up a pilot scheme to develop, investigate and evaluate such a bio-electrochemical fuel cell. Research work is also to be carried out to examine what installation options are viable in a sewage treatment plant and the effect such a fuel cell might have on overall plant operations.