Mario Castro Gama earns PhD for research on energy savings for water utilities

My research was part of the ICeWater project (2012-2015), my case study was carried out at the water supply system of Milan, Italy. I studied the amount of energy that the water utility was using with pumping water for customers. There are two ways I researched; one is to split the system in smaller subsystems, the second way was to operate the pumps when it is cheaper, during night-time when customers are not using much water. In my case study, the energy tariff is hourly, this is not common in the Netherlands, where you have a high and low tariff.

In Milan, the water authorities installed the solutions I proposed and this has reduced energy costs for water for half a million inhabitants. In addition, the reduction of pressures in the system should reduce leakages as a whole. In an ideal world, if we had all the computational resources and data available for different water utilities, we would manage to reduce the energy consumption for water supplies by at least 10 to 20 percent. My research proves that this is possible for large water systems. By comparison, the additional costs of water and energy for the computational power required are minimal.

In 2015, the first publication I wrote with a fellow PhD student, and my brother Quan Pan was accepted. That gave a really nice feeling, as it was a validation of all the work that we had done. We summarized 120 pages of a deliverable in just 10 pages for the project which funded our research.

Since my bachelor degree, I was convinced that I wanted to do a PhD, and never had any doubts about it. As I was born in Latin America, asking for help was challenging. If you do not learn to ask for help, you get bogged down in a small problem in a line of coding or writing a reply to reviewers of your articles. Asking for help will help you to steer in the right direction. However, if you want to improve your coding skills or improve your writing skills, you have do that yourself. There is no one, no tutorial, no book which can put in the learning hours for you. So start early.

A second aspect which was challenging for me was the finalization of my thesis. On this matter, I suggest other PhDs finalize their Frankensthesis as soon as possible, even before starting to work elsewhere. You only graduate once the draft becomes the approved version for external committee, it does not matter how many papers you write. The graduates at IHE Delft use Abbott’s learnings of hydroinformatics to write a manuscript, a book, not just a collection of articles with an intro as happens in other graduate schools.

I currently work as a senior Infrastructure Specialist at Vitens, the largest drinking water company of the Netherlands. In this role, I deal with all sorts of work on innovation, research for asset management, digitalization and underground infrastructure. Next step is to bring my research findings to applications within Vitens.

In addition, prior IHE Delft alumni (MSc students) under my evaluation, mentorship or tutelage  currently work at Vitens. Some of them started as interns and then go-on to become full time employees later. So, I look forward to keep bringing Master and PhD students into the practical aspects and the realities of a drinking water company.

Routine is key when you start your PhD research. You will have high and low amounts of work depending on the deliverables of the research project, on the publications that need to be submitted, and on the conferences, events your attend or your own holidays. There will be many months when you are coding and writing on your own. And others when it seems as if you need to have 36 hours a day to be able to finish your work. If you do not follow a proper routine in your schedule to do simple things such as: sleeping, shopping, cooking, cleaning your apartment, or even mingling and calling family back home, you will struggle to deliver your work on time.