Steinhardt Expertise at the IWA World Water Congress, Tokyo

The World Water Con­gress & Exhi­bi­tion, host­ed by the Inter­na­tion­al Water Asso­ci­a­tion (IWA), address­es an issue of prime impor­tance – the solu­tion of glob­al water prob­lems. Every two years pro­fes­sion­als, pub­lic offi­cials and inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies come togeth­er to shape the glob­al water man­age­ment sec­tor sus­tain­ably for the future.

As recog­nised expert in the field of mod­ern waste­water man­age­ment, Jörg Stein­hardt received an invi­ta­tion from the Tokyo Met­ro­pol­i­tan Gov­ern­ment and the Tokyo Met­ro­pol­i­tan Sew­er­age Bureau to present at the Japan­ese Pavil­ion at the World Water Con­gress on 18^thSep­tem­ber 2018.

The tech­nol­o­gy of the HydroSpin float­a­bles removal was the cen­tre of atten­tion in the Japan­ese pavil­ion. The gov­er­nor of the City of Tokyo, Ms Yuriko Koike, was impressed by the inno­v­a­tive func­tion­ing of HydroSpin, as demon­strat­ed with the aid of the water-dri­ven mod­el. A fur­ther sub­ject of approval in talks with Mr. Stein­hardt was the ongo­ing co-oper­a­tion between the City of Tokyo and Stein­hardt GmbH in sev­er­al inter­na­tion­al research projects.

Mr. Steinhardt’s pre­sen­ta­tion itself not only clar­i­fied the inno­v­a­tive HydroSpin tech­nol­o­gy but also high­light­ed its dif­fer­ing appli­ca­tions and the dif­fer­ing for­mal back­grounds in Europe and Japan. Despite the vary­ing con­struc­tion meth­ods of the sep­a­rat­ing struc­tures – the over­spill height tends to be high­er in Europe – the effi­cient oper­a­tion of HydroSpin float­a­bles removal can be observed through­out the world. Addi­tion­al­ly, a research pro­gramme car­ried out by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences in Mun­ster has proved that HydroSpin, when cou­pled with flow reg­u­la­tors, is able to cope with larg­er water vol­umes and high­er water­heads with­out flood­ing the WWTP. Thus, the equip­ment designed by Stein­hardt GmbH to ful­fil Euro­pean stan­dards is no less effec­tive than the Japan­ese orig­i­nal mod­el. In the mean­time, the use of a vir­tu­al flow mod­el­ling pro­gramme allows var­i­ous appli­ca­tion alter­na­tives for HydroSpin to be test­ed for effi­cien­cy and opti­mised before instal­la­tion takes place. 25 func­tion­ing HydroSpin aggre­gates and over 250 enquiries for the equip­ment in Ger­many, France, Bel­gium and Eng­land tes­ti­fy to the suc­cess of the patent­ed technology.

The mod­i­fi­ca­tion of HydroSpin tech­nol­o­gy for the Euro­pean mar­ket and the cus­tomi­sa­tion of Ger­man tech­nol­o­gy to Japan­ese stan­dards formed the focus of Mr. Steinhardt’s sec­ond pre­sen­ta­tion on the after­noon of the same day. The talk was attend­ed for the most part by pro­fes­sion­als from the storm and waste­water tech­nol­o­gy divi­sions of promi­nent Japan­ese com­pa­nies or from the Tokyo city cor­po­ra­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, the audi­ence was impressed by the flex­i­bil­i­ty of Ger­man medi­um-sized com­pa­nies that either on their own or with­in joint ven­tures or research groups devel­op their inno­v­a­tive ideas into mar­ket-ready products.

The struc­ture of the Ger­man water author­i­ties, with their deci­sion-mak­ing pow­ers wide­ly devolved as far as the bot­tom-most rung of the lad­der, also gained approval from an audi­ence far more used to a strict­ly cen­tralised hier­ar­chy of authority.

At the fin­ish of these two suc­cess­ful events, all con­cerned were agreed that the exchange of knowhow on an inter­na­tion­al lev­el is one of the most impor­tant com­po­nents required for the suc­cess of efforts to solve the world’s extreme­ly diverse water issues.