Fien Waegenaar wins the Water Technology Award

Every year, the Flanders water technology network watercircle.be awards young engineers for their promising research for the water industry. This year, CMET’s Fien Waegenaar won the first price for her master thesis ‘Biostable water, a sustainable solution for the drinking water sector to prevent invasion of pathogens during distribution?' (2019-2020).

This work is the result of a successful collaboration between Ghent University and the Flemish drinking water sector (Aquaflanders). In order to quantify biostable drinking water, Fien examined the invasion potential for two common drinking water coliforms. Next to that, Fien could demonstrate the benefits of online monitoring of drinking water to manage the drinking water quality in practice. Together with the CAPTURE Water partners Pidpa, FARYS, De Watergroep and Water-link, she performed a biological online monitoring project at the drinking water treatment plant in Kluizen. She compared different online monitoring devices and determined the detection limit towards contaminations, such as rainwater.

The project revealed a lot of promising opportunities for the use of real-time monitoring in routine analysis of drinking water quality. In the coming years, the research team has the ambition to develop an early-warning system for the water industry.

Fien was guided by her proud promotors Prof. Nico Boon and Prof. Bart De Gusseme and her tutor Ir. Jorien Favere. Fien recently started working on a PhD in close collaboration with the Flemish drinking water sector (Aquaflanders). Her research is part of a larger SBO project called BIOSTABLE (FWO), which combines the efforts of numerous disciplines and researchers within the CAPTURE research platform (https://capture-resources.be/projects/biostable).