Biological stability of drinking water

ONE OF EIGHT FOCUS AREAS FOR 2021-2025. You’ll find our current focus areas here.

Water enters the distribution system and must be microbiologically safe and biologically stable. But what does that really mean? There is no uniform definition of biostability, but basically it’s about delivering water all the way to the customer’s tap without unwanted growth of bacteria in the drinking water.

Our vision is therefore to be faster than the bacteria! We must keep an eye on the water quality throughout our system and, with the help of new technology for online water quality measurement, be able to act before the customer suffers problems due to changed drinking water quality.

Microbial changes - research and development ahead

Microbial changes in drinking water are a result of interactions between different microorganisms, bacteria, viruses and protozoa. Which changes occur depend, among other things, on:

Access to growth-limiting nutrients
Presence of disinfectants
Water temperature, residence time, pipe material and other environmental conditions
Interaction with the biofilm in the pipes and with microorganisms that live in the biofilm

It is also important to understand that the distribution system is not a static system but can be more like an organism that is constantly evolving. We replace pipes, repair leaks, reverse flow directions and more. All of this can affect water quality from a microbial perspective.

The industry works with research and development in order to better understand how different preparation methods affect the biostability of the water. Other major questions for the future are how we can develop and introduce faster analysis methods for drinking water quality – the methods we use today have response times of up to 7 days. As we replace the methods with rapid online measurement, another big future question arises – what do we do with all the data and how do we convert the data into information that can help us predict water quality?

What is Sweden Water Research working on in connection with the focus area?

SWR’s focus area Biologically stable drinking water conducts research and development projects around water quality in general and biostability in particular.

We look at the entire chain from raw water source to customer. We carry out targeted projects and test bed operations with the aim of adopting new technology for drinking water quality measurement, but also support research into a deeper understanding of the concept of biostability and how different preparation techniques and the pipeline network affect biostability. Our strength is our close collaboration between researchers, engineers, operational and laboratory staff.

Objectives of the focus area

By 2025, we will:

Be an innovation hub for new methods for online measurement of drinking water quality.
Measure drinking water quality online. Through AI, the data will interact with our real-time hydraulic model of the distribution system.
Having contributed to increased understanding of what biostability means and how it can be achieved.