Innovative particle measurement wins environmental technology award

NIVUS suc­cess­ful­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Envi­ron­men­tal Tech­nol­o­gy Award in the cat­e­go­ry Mea­sure­ment and Con­trol Tech­nol­o­gy 4.0 — with the new pos­si­bil­i­ty to mea­sure the small­est par­ti­cle con­cen­tra­tions (AFS) in water. The man­u­fac­tur­er was able to take one of the two 3rd places.

The Min­istry for the Envi­ron­ment, Cli­mate and Ener­gy Man­age­ment Baden-Würt­tem­berg has been award­ing the Envi­ron­men­tal Tech­nol­o­gy Prize every two years since 2009 for out­stand­ing and inno­v­a­tive prod­ucts in envi­ron­men­tal tech­nol­o­gy. The prize mon­ey amounts to 100,000 euros and is divid­ed among four cat­e­gories and a spe­cial jury prize. The Envi­ron­men­tal Tech­nol­o­gy Award hon­ors prod­ucts that make a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to resource effi­cien­cy and envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion and are about to be launched on the mar­ket or have been on the mar­ket for no longer than two years.

“Water is our most pre­cious resource. We must do every­thing we can to fur­ther opti­mize the water cycle. Our new mea­sur­ing sys­tem con­tributes to this and enables com­plete­ly new approach­es to water and waste­water treat­ment. We are there­fore very pleased and proud to receive the award.”

- Mar­cus Fis­ch­er, Man­ag­ing Director

The GmbH launched its patent­ed mea­sure­ment process at the end of last year. The man­u­fac­tur­er has already won the 2020 Sil­ver Research Trans­fer Award from the Heil­bronn-Franken Cham­ber of Indus­try and Com­merce for it. The prod­uct is the result of a research col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Insti­tute of San­i­tary Engi­neer­ing, Water Qual­i­ty and Waste Man­age­ment at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Stuttgart, head­ed by Dr. Asmorom Kibrom (Nivus GmbH) and Dr. Har­ald Schöneberg­er (Uni­ver­si­ty of Stuttgart).

The robust, ultra­sound-based solu­tion is main­ly used for con­tin­u­ous mon­i­tor­ing of rain­wa­ter and sur­face water. The mea­sure­ment sys­tem enables the record­ing of both solids loads and par­ti­cle size dis­tri­b­u­tion in real time. Due to the con­tin­u­ous acqui­si­tion of the mea­sure­ment sys­tem, time-con­sum­ing sam­pling can be saved. This opens up new pos­si­bil­i­ties for the qual­i­ty assess­ment of water, e.g. when check­ing the solids reten­tion effect of rain­wa­ter treat­ment plants or for qual­i­ty-depen­dent con­trol of rain­wa­ter flows in real time.