Section: Other Grants and Activities

International cooperations

Cooperation with African countries

The MERE project-team is involved in cooperation with Africa in different but related ways.

• C. Lobry, as a former director of CIMPA, has been involved for a long time in cooperation with African mathematical teams. He visits Africa very often and delivers lectures in summer schools or universities.

• The team has also a close relationship with the LANI (Laboratoire d'Analyse Numérique et Informatique de l'Université Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis du Sénégal).

Cooperation with Maghreb countries

Claude Lobry and Tewfik Sari are involved in the program Aires-Sud (2009-2011). The program runs under the title “Epuration des Eaux par Procédés Membranaires: Modélisation et Commande”, is managed by Brahim Cherki, University of Tlemcen, Algeria, and also associates the University of Saint Louis, Senegal.

Cooperation with Latin America

The MERE project-team is carrying on his cooperation with Chile in the scope of the INRIA/CONICYT projet 'ECOLOMICRO2'. The First Franco-Chilean workshop on bioprocesses modelling is scheduled in January 2010 at Valparaiso, and is organized by both the team MERE and researchers from CMM (Santiago) and UTFSM (Valparaiso). Our Chilean collaborators will be an “associated team” from 2010 onwards.

Cooperation with North America

F. Mazenc interacts with researchers of the Department of Mathematics of the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in the framework of the NSF/DMS Grants 0424011 and 0708084. In particular, in collaboration with M. Malisoff and M.S. de Queiroz, several papers have been written in the past few years. A research monograph appeared this year. This book, entitled “Construction of Strict Lyapunov Functions” and geared to advanced graduate students and researchers, is published in the Springer Communications and Control Engineering Series. F. Mazenc also paid a visit in August 2009 to Jiang Zhong Ping (Polytechnic Institute of New York) in order to prepare future collaborations with him. Their first paper has been presented in the Conference on Decision and Control.

B. Haegeman has an on-going collaboration with the Theoretical Ecology laboratory at McGill University, Montreal, led by M. Loreau. Two common papers have now been published; other work is in preparation. B. Haegeman initiated a new collaboration with the Theoretical Ecology laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, led by J. Weitz. A number of joint research projects have been defined.

The TREASURE network

The 3+3 Mediterranean program (Algeria, Spain, France, Italy, Morocco, Tunisia) is a collaborative INRIA research program initiative. It aims at selecting thematic research actions associating at least two North and two South Countries in order to finance mobility and research. The actual TREASURE project is coordinated by the MERE research team and a research group in mathematics and automatic control of the University of Tlemcen, Algeria. Initially, the involved partners only consisted in France, Algeria, Italy and Tunisia. During the first project year (2006), we defined the research program and extended the consortium to Spain. The diffusion of knowledge is one component of the project. Bilateral meetings have been organized together with meetings and seminars, and several workshops are regularly organized with all partners in partners countries (cf. the website http://www.treasure.fr for further information). From a scientific point of view, the TREASURE project aims at developing an innovative treatment integrated process in order to treat waters to be reused in agriculture in semi-arid climate countries. The main innovation consists in the coupling of advanced anaerobic technology and membrane bioreactors. This configuration offers many advantages.

• First, the nitrogen is not degraded and can be used to amend the soils to improve its fertility;

• Second, anaerobic digestion produces less sludge than aerobic processes, thus decreasing the running costs of the integrated process;

• Third, the use of membrane allows the water to be used for unrestricted agriculture;

• Finally, the biogas produced can eventually be valorized to produce energy.

Membranes allow the quality of the rejected water to be in accordance with the microbial normative constraints imposed for agriculture reuse. This important, ambitious program not only includes development and industrial challenges, but is also concerned with theoretical research questions related to microbial ecology (how to decrease the membrane fouling?) allowing the pluridisciplinary to express deeply within the program.