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German-Israel cooperation on water technologies - ifak scientist at a project meeting in Haifa

In the second week of november, Dr Schütze of ifak is attending a project meeting with ifak's cooperation partner in Israel. In this workshop with Prof. Friedler of Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and his research group, this scientists are discussing the results achieved so far in the CLUWAL project, which is funded by German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of the State of Israel. In this bilateral research cooperation,simulation-based methods for the assessment of urban water system are developed.These will allow municipalities and water authorities a prudent management of their water systems, by assessing various technological options according to social, ecological and economic criteria of sustainability. Of particular importance in this project are rainwater and stormwater harvesting, as a means of saving precious water resources.

Only a few months after start of the project, a general module library for the simulation of availability and demand of water resources has developed and presented. This will be extended and refined in the next phases of the project; its practical applicability will be demonstrated by their adaptation to three case studies. In this project, not only issues of water engineering are being addressed, but also aspects of environmental impact assessment and life cycle analysis form inherent parts of the simulation methodology under development. The Israeli partner has started with an implmentation of a method for the design of rainwater tanks commonly applied in Israel in the simulation software Simba#, which has been developed at ifak. Rainwater reuse plays an important role not only in water-scarce regions such as Israel or some parts of Germany,but also in regions with abundant water resources -such as Quibó/Colombia, which is among the regions worldwide with highest annual rainfall, where Dr Schütze has been invited in August to moderate a workshop on urban water management.

Early next week, the leading scientists of the CLUWAL projectwill present their work at the status conference of BMBF and MOST, where all German-Israeli cooperation projects on water technologies funde by these two ministries will exchange their findings.