Environmental Technology Field Station

Our Environmental Technology Field Station (ETFS) is a teaching and research facility that allows our students and researchers to study, research and improve our drainage systems, the detection of contaminants in our soil and water, short-term and long-term management of waste, and the development of more sustainable ways of managing the impact we make on the planet.

Developed in partnership with Southern Water, the ETFS enables our students, researchers and staff to work with equipment, information and samples that are actively-used in the UK waste management system.

Students can use this facility to familiarise themselves with running a treatment plant, conduct tests using professional standard equipment and measure their hypotheses and results using samples currently in the ecosystem.

Our Environmental Technology and Management researchers work collaboratively with Southern Water in an environment using samples from a live treatment plant, and regularly engage in cross-disciplinary research with the University's School of Civil Engineering and School of the Environment and Life Sciences.

We regularly partner with external organisations to support technology and environmental research supporting the public and private sector, from expert consultation, environmental monitoring and laboratory analysis, through to training provided to water industry professionals.

Explore our Environmental Technology Field Station

Discover the infrastructure that manages our water systems.

Dr Fay Couceiro

People often wonder what public health and civil engineering has to do with one another. Well, the answer is a lot.

When you think about water, whether it be potable or dirty water, all of that is managed by infrastructure and civil engineering. And that is what you would learn about in this lab here.

If I begin with some of the things you might learn about drinking water, you would learn about the chlorination and disinfection of it and its potability and also how it's distributed.

Within the university we have an amazing facility up in Petersfield, which is an onsite sewage treatment works. This belongs to Southern Water and we have laboratories there. So we do an awful lot of work looking at sewage treatment and when you think about the implications between sanitation and human health, you can see how civil engineering plays a large part here.

The sorts of things you might learn when you look at sewage or you study sewage and civil engineering, it would be around biochemical oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand and ammonia. Each of these things has a real impact on the environment around us.

Things like bio chemical oxygen demand indicate how many microbes are in the water and can give us an understanding of the health of rivers where they are released to and ammonia is, of course, toxic to fish. So it's very important that we understand how to remove that from the sewage before it is released into the environment.

This lab is also used by PhD students as well as undergraduate and master students for their projects. The types of projects we might run in here and are currently running are micro plastics, contaminated land and end of waste policies and products.

I hope you enjoy looking around our virtual lab tour here and hopefully we will see you soon.

Equipment and amenities

Microbiology laboratory for the analysis of total coliforms, faecal coliforms, viral load and bioremediation media analysis
Green house and plant growth facilities
Experimental test beds and hydroponic testing apparatus
Hard-standing experimental rig testing zones
Teaching laboratories
Meeting and conference facilities
Waste water treatment tests such as BOD, COD, pH, total suspended solids, settleable solids and volatile suspended solids, % total solids, LOI, conductivity
UV/V spectrophotometry analysis for organic and inorganic analytes
Nutrient auto-analysis for nitrite, nitrate, ammonium and phosphate
Microsensors and electrodes for fine-scale oxygen and pH tests
Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry tests to find organic pollutants in water, soil and sediments including total petroleum hydrocarbons, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, organometallics and pesticides
Total concentrations and in-situ measurement metal testing in water, soil and sediment

Projects

The Field Station is often used for cross-disciplinary studies by the Environmental Technology Research Group. Projects that have been conducted at the centre include:

The development of a chemical free water treatment system
The development of constructed wetlands for wastewater treatment
Phytoremediation of contaminated soils and sediments
Investigations into sustainable drainage systems
The evaluation of novel package sewage treatment systems
Investigations into the fate of pharmaceuticals in wastewater processing

Related facilities

Environmental Technology Laboratory

This lab hosts all the facilities you need to conduct simple water tests for biochemical oxygen demand to suspended solids, nutrient analysis, pH and conductivity.

Learn more

Geotechnics Laboratory

Our Geotechnics Laboratory – or Soils Lab – has equipment for analysing fine- and coarse-grained soils.

Explore lab

Environmental Chemistry Analysis Laboratory

Use the equipment in this lab to identify and analyse chemicals and biochemicals in surface water, groundwater and soil, so you can develop strategies to minimise and remove their harmful environmental effects.