EVANSTON – Northwestern University engineers and social scientists, playing a leading role in seeking solutions to a global crisis over water insecurity, visited Israel this week to deepen academic exchanges, create new partnerships and collaborate with Chicago officials who are also working on the problem.
Members of the Northwestern community are in Israel participating in WATEC, a major international water industry conference, as part of a delegation with the city of Chicago.
Yesterday, Aaron Packman, director of the Northwestern Center for Water Research, and Fruma Yehiely, associate vice president for research at Northwestern, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Ben-Gurion University’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research in Israel.
A key focus of the trip is to highlight Chicago’s leading role in advancing water technology innovation and conservation through Current while showcasing new collaborations leveraging Israeli water expertise.
Israel has large-scale water reuse for agriculture, according to Packman.
Water research is already underway by Northwestern researchers and their counterparts at Ben-Gurion University.
“What we hope to achieve is to answer the following question: Is it possible to design optimal mesh or nets that allow rain water to pass through in one direction but prevents water vapor transport through in the other direction?” Patankar said.
“In arid regions like Israel, water evaporation directly from soil is about 40 percent of the water budget in agriculture,” Patankar said.
To solve this dilemma, we propose these novel moisture-valving nets.” A more holistic approach Sera L. Young, assistant professor of anthropology and global health at Northwestern, is working with researchers from Ben-Gurion and National Taiwan University on developing a scale that measures the full human experience with water.
Moreover, we can use this scale to see if the technology is working.