Full house for Southampton's 2017 NEXUS 'Sustainable Infrastructure Systems' CDT conference
The popular conference: 'Infrastructure and the Environment', which addressed varied nexus-science issues in the areas of water, transport and energy, was held 8 November, in Garden Court, University of Southampton and attracted eminent keynote speakers.
The first of these, Dr Dhivya Puri, represented Industry. Dr Puri currently works at Fiberight, having completed her PhD at Southampton in 2014. Her talk: 'Exploiting the potential of Anaerobic Digestion in a UK bio-refinery from residual waste', looked at Fiberight’s development of a circular economy solution for residual municipal solid waste (landfill bound MSW). In this process, mixed waste is processed to recover recyclables, energy, and Industrial Biotechnology (IB) building blocks.
Professor Ian Williams, Centre for Environmental Sciences, University of Southampton, gave the keynote for the 'Water' theme. Ian’s talk: 'Applying circular economy thinking to industry: a case study for Southern water', looked at at a collaboration between Universities and external organisations and how these offer multiple and mutual benefits. The presentation focused on work undertaken with Southern Water and undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics from the Centre for Environmental Sciences, with the aim of identifying opportunities to apply circular economy thinking to Southern Water's operations at a waste water treatment plant (WWTP) in England.
Professor Patrick James from the Energy and Climate Change research group at the University of Southampton gave the keynote talk for the Energy theme. Patrick's talk: 'Future Cities and Disruptive Technologies', examined the ghettoisation of certain areas of Southampton which have been cut off from the city centre by the city’s infrastructure. In the talk Prof James also looked at future cities development.
Dr Ioannis Kaparias from the Transportation Research Group at the University of Southampton and his PhD student Shah Miah from City University London, were the keynote speakers for the Transport theme. Their talk: 'Monitoring Cyclist trajectories in urban environments using an instrumented bicycle', looked at the use of an instrumented bicycle, the iBike, to localise and track cyclists throughout London using low-cost micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) sensor configuration. The iBike is used to collect vast amounts of microscopic cyclist-safety-related data from urban environments, enabling the formulation of behavioural and predictive accident models, for use in active and passive safety systems’ development, as well as in road safety policy-making.
This was the third annual CDT-SIS conference and the topics covered showed the interdisciplinarity, depth and breadth of the NEXUS related research of the CDT. Topics covered in the 'Water' theme ranged from woody debris jams in rivers causing structural damages to bridges; fish migration and passage; the use of bubble curtains and fish passes at weirs and dams to enable safe fish migration upstream and irrigation in developing countries.
Topics covered in the 'Transport' theme were: the development of travel apps and route planners and the dissemination of travel information to increase the efficiency of public transport and users; the development of high speed railways; eco driving and the role of soil characterisation and behaviour in transport infrastructure problems.
In the 'Energy' theme, topics included electric vehicles; anaerobic digestion; battery technologies and photo-electrochemical characterisation of p-Gap for photelectric water splitting.
There were awards for the best oral presentation or talk given and for the best poster presentation. Winner of the best poster presentation was Diego Panici whilst the winner of the best oral presentation was Maria Ramos Suarez.