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UCT RESEARCH REPORT 2012
State-of-the-art
Water Laboratory
In The Pipeline
Recognising that water is a national resource under considerable
stress, UCT is committed to ensuring that it is optimally managed
in all sectors and at all levels within the country.
D
emonstrating this commitment, the university will, through the Crystallization
and Precipitation Research Unit (CPU), establish a new laboratory with the
capacity to provide a comprehensive service to water researchers. The H2O (aq)
laboratory is expected to open in the Department of Chemical Engineering,
possibly in 2013, and will feature a combination of new and existing research
practices. The nature of the water research undertaken by the CPU already focuses
on novel techniques for water treatment.
H
2
O (aq) will offer specialist water and brine analysis, as well as research. The intention
is to be able to offer a service to researchers who are investigating various water-
related questions; in other words, it is not a standard water-analysis laboratory. For
example, the laboratory will accommodate a researcher looking at how different river
contaminants affect the aquatic life, a researcher investigating the effect of trace metals
on water-treatment processes, and yet another studying the effect of water composition
on concrete corrosion of bridges. Over the last decade, water analysis has become
increasingly technical and, as such, requires the use of state-of-the-art equipment and
fewer wet-chemistry techniques (although wet chemistry does still have a place). H
2
O
(aq) will use Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectroscopy (ICP-MS) for metal
analysis, High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and spectrophotometry
for anion analysis, and total organic carbon for bacterial tests, but the basic tools,
such as pH testing and conductivity, will also be utilised. It is expected that such
analyses will lead to multidisciplinary research projects and also to collaborations
across faculties and between the projects through the common theme of water.