On 16 March, Holly and Nicola from WRT’s Monitoring Team attended a training session at Kilbury Sewage Treatment Works in Buckfastleigh as part of the EU Horizon project, UrbaQuantum. This collaborative initiative brings together partners from academia, industry, NGOs, and local stakeholders to develop innovative approaches for measuring, modelling, and managing urban water pollution. The project aims to improve understanding of how pollutants from surface run-off and combined sewer overflows enter and move through catchments, with a particular focus on predicting impacts on the River Dart’s bathing water quality. Ultimately, UrbaQuantum seeks to enhance incident awareness and response times, supporting more informed and proactive water management decisions.
The day commenced with a comprehensive guided tour of the treatment works, led by a sewage treatment technical specialist from SWW. The tour provided valuable insight into the physical and biological treatment processes employed on site, including the separation of liquid and solid waste and the role of bacterial decomposition on biobeds in treating organic matter.
In the afternoon, participants assembled and piloted the Xylem SurfBee autonomous surface vehicle. This advanced, remote-operated platform can be equipped with continuously logging, multiparameter water quality and/or flow sensors, enabling the collection of high-resolution spatial and temporal data along river transects.
Xylem SurfBee autonomous surface vehicle
The deployment of this technology will support:
• Identification of the precise locations of discharges
• Improved understanding of how pollutant concentrations disperse downstream of outfalls
• Assessment of how these patterns vary under different flow conditions and across seasons
The data generated will contribute to the development of more sophisticated predictive models, enabling industry partners to anticipate pollution events with greater accuracy and respond more effectively.