NEC

Improving aging water supply infrastructures with a Smart Water Systems Lab

Global challenges such as climate change mean that cities need to be more responsive, efficient and sustainable with their water resources. Innovations in the technologies and processes that we develop to manage water resources could be adopted by many cities around the world.

This collaboration between Imperial and the IT and telecommunications company, NEC, aims to develop technologies to make water supply infrastructures more energy efficient, adaptable and environmentally friendly.

Our Corporate Partnerships team received NEC’s initial enquiry and linked the company’s interest to ongoing research. Building on our academics' previous collaborations, our Corporate Partnerships Manager in the Business School helped create a strong proposal for the company, which brought together Imperial academics in a number of different departments in order to create a five-year collaborative project. The project offers a unique chance to integrate NEC's cloud, Big Data analytics and sensing expertise with the novel sensing and modelling technologies developed at Imperial by academics including Dr Ivan Stoianov, Project Principal Investigator from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Dr Julie McCann (pictured below), Principal Investigator from the Department of Computing.

The Business School's Corporate Partnership Manager helped coordinate the financial and contractual negotiations so that Julie was able to get a strong commitment from the company within only a few months – NEC noted that this was the fastest turnaround time they’d seen.

You can read NEC's press release on the partnership here.

Above, lead academic Professor Julie McCann in her lab