Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM)

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) is the oldest and largest Spanish technical university, with more than 4.000 faculty members, around 38.000 undergraduate students and 6.000 postgraduates in 21 Schools of study. UPM benefits from the heritage of its schools: some were founded in the 18th century.

Nowadays UPM covers most of engineering disciplines, as well as Architecture, Computer Science and Geodesy & Cartography. Moreover, UPM has a top quality academic establishment, a strong commitment to R&D and Innovation boasting over 200 Research Units and over 10 Research Institutes and Technological Centres, and contributing significantly to the international scientific community with a high number of journal papers, conference communications, and PhD theses. UPM researchers have a large expertise in research projects participation. Regarding FP6, UPM took part in 149 EU R&D projects with 25+ M€ of funding. In FP7, as of July 2010 UPM has participated in 193 projects with 33+ M€ of funding.

The College of Agriculture Engineering consists of 6 departments, responsible for implementing under and post graduate programs and they carry out all the research work. Involved in this project: Dept. of Agrarian Production and the Dept.of Mechanical Engineering, Chemistry and Industrial Design, who have co-operated for over 20 years in the subjects of phytodepuration with aquatic macrophytes (AM) and renewable energies. UPM holds patents related to AM applications in floating systems. Team members have expertise in the development of AM applications and have contributed with scientific articles.

The research team of UPM has participated in several LIFE projects, the most relevant to this proposal was “New floating macrophyte green filters (FMF) for the Mediterranean Region” from 2002-2006 within the Natura 2000 framework and together with the City Council of Lorca. At national level, they have also developed projects of AM, however never related biomass applications.

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