Excursions

From May 12-17, 2024, 19 students of civil and environmental engineering visited the IFAT environmental trade fair in Munich together with Prof. Iris Steinberg and Prof. Stefan Krause to gain insights into the practice of water and recycling management. IFAT is the world's leading trade fair for water, sewage, waste and raw materials management and attracted around 140,000 visitors this year. The students were able to get a good overview of new technologies and treatment processes and also expand their network in discussions with experts. The group was accommodated in the Munich Youth Hostel.

The excursion took place as part of the Environmental Technology Seminar module, which is offered every two years at IFAT. The seminar consists of a preparatory part in which the individual processes are pre-measured and research is carried out on possible manufacturers. Subsequently, the necessary information is obtained at the trade fair in teams of two in order to be able to make well-founded statements about the individual products. In the follow-up part, the information is evaluated and summarized in a report.

Each student has 2 tasks to complete. One task is in the field of waste technology in which processes such as shredders, ferrous metal separation, air separators or sensor-supported sorting must be researched. In the other task in the field of wastewater treatment, a sewage treatment plant was dimensioned and the teams had to collect information on components such as blowers, pumps, surface filters or sludge dewatering units.

There was also a team that took part in the 4th World University Challenge (WUC) organized by the German Association for Water, Wastewater and Waste (DWA) in Munich. The competition aims to promote the next generation of water management engineers and make companies aware of young talent. A team from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering took part in the World University Challenge again this year (and for the third time in total). As part of this challenge, three tasks from the fields of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), process engineering (optimization of a pump control system) and wastewater treatment (dynamic simulation of a wastewater treatment plant) had to be solved. Teams from several countries were present and took on this challenge while networking and exchanging ideas.

This year's participants from our department (in the picture from left to right: Fynn Schoen, Nils Huckschlag and Christian Nelles) achieved an excellent 4th place in this year's challenge. Congratulations!