The director of IMDEA Water, Eloy García Calvo, received an honourable mention to the public-private partnership by the Aquaelectra project during the ceremony of the X madri+d Awards held Wednesday at the headquarters of the College of Architects of Madrid. Lucia Fígar, head of the Deparment of Education of the Community of Madrid, and Luis Sánchez, CEO of the foundation, chaired the ceremony.

IMDEA Water, the Center of New Water Technologies-CENTA and companies Euroestudios, Depuración de Aguas del Mediterráneo-DAM and JOCA are the partners of Aquaelectra, a project funded by the INNPACTO programme from the Spanish Ministry of Economy. The award, which has no endowment, aims to give visibility to “research and innovative work on public-private partnership, giving relevance and disseminating a model of success and its players,” according to the jury’s decision.

The goal of the project, pioneer in Spain, is to adapt Microbial Electrochemical Technologies to existing designs at water treatment plants.

Among the profitable results of the project are three patents. One of them is protected by the PCT/ES2012/070153 and involves using new electrogenic properties of a biofilter for wastewater treatment.

There are also two applications for national patents for wastewater treatment based on the principles of microbial electrogenesis. These systems attempt to solve some of the problems encountered across water treatment, in which reagents such as oxygen, for the removal of organic matter, or methanol to remove nitrates, represent an additional cost while generate large biomass or sludge.