Drinking Water Treatment Optimization: Challenges and Innovations

Dear Colleagues,

Rising water needs for a growing population in many cities in combination with challenges connected to climate change require overseeing and optimizing the production of drinking water in the near future. The expected larger and faster variation in the quality of raw water with respect to turbidity, organic matter, and potentially related factors, such as pollutants and microbes, may be counteracted by a careful selection of smart optimization techniques related to existing or new processes for drinking water production. This choice must also be based on the increasing levels of safety and sustainability demanded in the water sector. In this Special Issue, we wish to document how the drinking water sector is responding in various ways to the above-mentioned challenges. We welcome manuscripts that document limits in operation, techniques, and tools for the identification of optimization potentials and optimization efforts, highlight the use of advanced analytical techniques, sensors, and digitalization, and present benchmarking techniques that allow the valorization of different approaches from a holistic viewpoint. We encourage contributions dealing with, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Advanced organic matter characterization and improved NOM removal techniques.
• Techniques for quantitative benchmarking treatment efficiencies.
• Techniques for the identification of optimization needs and potentials
• Case studies for full-scale optimization efforts
• Automatization for optimal treatment as well as strategies and techniques of handling of massive data sets.
• Use of various sensors and external data for optimizing drinking water treatment processes
• Economical and sustainability limits for improved drinking water treatment.

Prof. Dr. Stephan J. Köhler
Dr. Bjørnar Eikebrokk
Dr. Martin Wagner
Prof. Dr. Peter Jarvis
Dr. Alexander Keucken
Guest Editors

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