“Create a network around your research idea”

September 15th was the kick-off day of the new projects funded by “Create a network around your research idea” (Metti in rete la tua idea di ricerca), a call for proposals launched in December 2016 by Politecnico di Torino with the support of Compagnia di San Paolo and aiming at supporting collaborative research projects with an interdisciplinary nature through collaboration with universities, companies and other entities of the socio-economic system, located in Italy or in the EU.
Out of 43 received proposals, 14 projects has been selected for funding, and 4 of them are coordinated by DIATI’s researchers:

SUPERGREEN – SUstainable Purification of watER with GREEN walls
Prof. Fulvio Boano
The aim of SUPERGREEN is to couple greywater recycling as a nutrient-rich irrigation source together with the use of green walls, which are vegetated vertical elements that exploit unused building surfaces to provide benefits such as greening, improved aesthetics, and shading. SUPERGREEN will feature an extensive campaign of laboratory experiments to investigate the efficiency of green wall in treating greywater. The proposed approach will represent a sustainable greywater treatment technical solution characterized by low energy requirements and much less space demanding than other natural treatment options.

FLOWING -Forward Osmosis to Reuse Produced Water in the Oil & Gas Industry
Prof. Alberto Tiraferri
The main goals of the project will be advance in Forward Osmosis (FO) – an emerging treatment process, equivalent to reverse osmosis, and the identification of the best operating procedure to maximize water productivity and contaminant rejection when treating typical wastewater streams from oil and gas operations, as well as the creation of an FO membrane specifically customized for this process.

Bubbles4Life – Bubbles for life: hydrodynamic cavitation for water disinfection in developing countries
Prof. Costantino Manes
About 780 million people in the world have no access to drinkable water, with 3 million people dying every year of sanitation and hygiene related issues - most of them in developing countries - especially due to the lack of appropriate water-treatment methods. Technologies that are commonly used in the developed world cannot be used so easily in developing countries for their high costs of installation, maintenance and operation and because they require chemicals that are not easy to retrieve. Bubbles4Life intends to tackle this issue by further developing Hydrodynamic Cavitation as a promising technique for water sanitation.

NANOGRASS - Development of a NANO-herbicide formulation to minimize the impact of aGRochemicAls on Soil and Subsoil
Prof. Tiziana Tosco
NANOGRASS aims at minimizing the environmental impact of herbicides by developing a new environmentally friendly nano-formulation for their optimized delivery, reducing uncontrolled spreading in the environment. The approach followed in NANOGRASS will be potentially applicable to other agrochemicals, thus opening perspectives for a family of nano-formulated products with minimal environmental impact