TelLab wins €1m in EU funding to commercial environmental solution

The challenge we are solving

Aquamonitrix™ offers the first accurate and affordable means for regulators and emitters to remotely monitor water quality in real-time, providing an instantaneous alert to pollution breaches and enabling decision-makers to take immediate interventional action.

At present, continuous, real-time water-quality sensors are prohibitively expensive and highly inflexible. Therefore, the majority of monitoring is by ‘grab n’ lab’ methods, which involve physically filling sample bottles and returning them to the laboratory for testing.

This means that results often only become available after several days. Moreover, they merely provide a snapshot of conditions at the moment when the sample was taken, potentially missing episodic pollution events.

We have developed the device in response to growing regulatory demands for higher frequency monitoring of nitrate/nitrite, phosphate and ammonia nutrients, emerging from wastewater treatment plants, industry, agriculture, fish farms and domestic septic tanks.

Such pollutants are increasingly being targeted by drivers such as the Water Framework Directive, as they feed micro-organisms in water, accelerating their growth and potentially leading to toxic algae blooms; oxygen deprivation for competing aquatic species; and health risks for humans.