EASY Water
Project duration
May 01, 2026 - July 31, 2027
Project partners
- Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH
- EASY Photonics GmbH
Funding
The project is funded by the European Union under the Fortissimo Plus porgram.
Project Description
EASY Photonics GmbH addresses one of the most pressing regulatory and business challenges in the European water sector: the cost-efficient and reliable monitoring of micropollutants in wastewater. The upcoming European Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive (KARL) obliges municipal and industrial operators to systematically monitor a broad spectrum of substances, including PFAS, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and microplastics. Current laboratory-based approaches are costly, slow, and fragmented, resulting in annual compliance costs exceeding several billion euros across Europe.
To meet this challenge, EASY Photonics is developing a novel multi-sensor platform that integrates ten complementary optical and photonic methods into a single robust device, designed without moving parts or manual calibration. This ensures highly reproducible datasets that are ideally suited for AI-based data fusion. Within PhotonHub Europe projects, EASY Photonics is advancing the hardware, with an MVP expected by early 2026.
The proposed FFplus Business Experiment focuses on building the computational backbone required to exploit this hardware commercially. EASY Photonics will generate reproducible datasets with spiked environmental samples, develop correction algorithms and preprocessing routines, and — together with the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) of Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) — implement HPC-enabled AI models for multi-sensor data fusion. Innowise Group will provide software engineering support for device-level preprocessing and SaaS integration.
The experiment will deliver:
- Validated MVP datasets and correction algorithms,
- HPC workflows for fused AI models,
- Compliance-ready reporting workflows aligned with KARL, and
- A clear exploitation path leading to market entry in 2027.
The consortium brings together complementary expertise in experimental photonics, HPC, and software engineering. The outcome will be a market-ready solution that reduces compliance costs for utilities and industries, accelerates regulatory decision-making, and strengthens Europe’s capacity to address emerging water challenges.
This business experiment addresses EASY Photonics’ core commercial challenge: scaling from lab-grade sensing to utility-scale operations with HPC as prerequisite for industrial SLAs. Without HPC, the system would not be viable for industrial application and would remain confined to academic prototypes.