CENTAUR™ Scoops Most Innovative New Technology of the Year at Water Industry Awards 2018

EMS is proud to have been awarded the Most Innovative New Technology of the Year for CENTAUR™ at this year’s Water Industry Awards.

The Water Industry Awards are a prestigious event that celebrate and reward outstanding achievement and innovation in the UK water industry. CENTAUR™ won the Most Innovative New Technology of the Year award from a shortlist of 6 high-calibre entries.

Professor Pete Skipworth, Managing Director of EMS said,

“CENTAUR is a truly disruptive technology and we wanted to pitch it against the best the industry has to offer. This recognition from the UK water industry is an incredible accolade, and EMS and the CENTAUR team are thrilled to have received this award in such a competitive category.”

CENTAUR™ is an intelligent, autonomous system for local urban flood risk reduction that utilises untapped sewer capacity. A gate controls flow driven by an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm which analyses local level data. CENTAUR™ can also be used for limiting CSO spills, managing flows into energy-intensive assets, and as a complementary solution to work in harmony with SUDS and to reduce the size of new storage and attenuation schemes and accompanying capital investment.

CENTAUR™ was born out of the need to reduce flooding (or create extra network capacity) in ever more crowded urban spaces. It was also developed in response to the compounding effects of climate change and more intense storms and flash-flooding problems.

CENTAUR™ is an asset-stretching technology. The key benefit of the system is the creation of new capacity from existing infrastructure at much lower cost relative to alternative solutions – or in situations where space and capital simply aren’t available. This capacity is targeted at reducing flood-risk, environmental impact, and/or energy consumption.

This is a self-managing system which is easily deployed. It is modular and extensible, so can be implemented gradually where several CENTAUR™ systems can be linked together to form an intelligent wastewater network.
CENTAUR™ has been successfully working in Portugal in the Coimbra wastewater network to intelligently control in-sewer flows. You can read how CENTAUR™ has helped minimise flood risk in this highly urbanised catchment, helping to protect a World Heritage Site here.

Telmo Paula, Águas de Coimbra is quoted,

“The CENTAUR system has been successfully working in Coimbra, managing peak flows and reducing flood risk in an important area of the city. Through utilising existing storage capacity within the wastewater network, volume is retained during periods of intense rainfall and only discharged once the flow has reduced downstream”

CENTAUR™ has been developed through a consortium of Universities, Water companies and SME’s. It is through the combination of this breadth of expertise and large, world-leading research facilities that the idea for CENTAUR™ has been realised as a finished, robust market product.

For more information on the CENTAUR™ project please contact Dr Kieran Williams at Kieran.williams@em-solutions.co.uk or call on +44 (0) 114 272 2270

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 641931.