How can we supply megacities with clean drinking water? Is it possible to transform coal into electrical energy without damaging the environment? Which innovative technologies can provide early warning of dangerous landslides? These are questions that Professor Rafig Azzam is trying to get to the bottom of. The Jordanian-born scientist has held the chair of engineering geology and hydrogeology at RWTH Aachen, one of Germany’s Excellence Universities, since 2002. Environmental and water management are among his main areas of work. These fields are becoming increasingly important around the world and now attract a large number of students. Last semester a total of 290 young men and women began bachelor’s degree programmes in applied geosciences and georesource management at RWTH Aachen – three times as many as three years ago. The department also has a strong magnetic attraction for international students: Rafig Azzam is currently supervising four Chinese PhD students.
Links all over the world
Rafig Azzam is a networker, a knowledge manager who tirelessly establishes links abroad and concludes cooperative partnerships: “Science needs international networks. And the network grows larger with every PhD student that engages in international work or comes to us from abroad.” He maintains close contacts with researchers in the Arab world, in Mexico, Canada and Australia. He also supports the German-Arab/Iranian Higher Education Dialogue and the new German-Indian Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development, which were established by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). His graduates often focus on international subjects – such as research on groundwater quality in Indonesia or the weathering of rocks in the cliff city of Petra. In 2008 Rafig Azzam concluded an official cooperation agreement with the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. “It is exciting to see how others solve problems. Chinese, for example, frequently work in a more theoretical way with models, while we take a more experimental approach. We can learn a lot from one another.”
Excellent RWTH Aachen
“The RWTH has an excellent reputation outside Germany,” says Professor Azzam, “and interest in coming to Aachen is correspondingly great.” That is something the son of Christian Palestinian parents, who was born in 1951, can well understand. As a young man he was also attracted to Germany by a study programme at RWTH. After gaining his PhD, his academic career initially took him to Australia and then on to a first chair at Freiberg University of Mining and Technology (TUBAF) in Saxony, before he returned to Aachen. The father of four is married to a German and clearly feels very much at home in the small city of Aachen with its large technological university.
Innovation through lateral thinking
Learning, increasing knowledge – these are activities that have driven Rafig Azzam since he was a small boy: “My scientific curiosity is simply enormous.” It ranges far beyond his own specialist area. Lateral thinking is Rafig Azzam’s passion – and his research also benefits from it. When he read about cigarette box-sized minicomputers that monitor the movements of containers in self-organizing networks, he immediately had an idea. Couldn’t they also be used to control networks of sensors in early warning systems for natural disasters, such as the landslides that threaten in many regions of the world? Today this research project is one of the most important in his department. It uses sensors from the automotive industry that normally trigger airbags. The goal is a totally new form of highly economical and close-meshed early warning system that can equally warn of imminent tsunamis, forest fires and floods. Rafig Azzam is happiest when, as here, high-tech knowledge can be combined with simple implementation, because then research results can also be applied in the world’s poorer regions.
Environmentally friendly energy production
RWTH engineering geologists have also attracted attention in the energy industry with another research project supervised by Professor Azzam. The CO2SINUS project uses a new approach to extracting energy from coal by converting the coal directly into gas in the seam. The innovative feature of this process is that the resulting carbon dioxide can be immediately stored underground, thereby preventing the greenhouse gas even entering the atmosphere. The process thus has an exemplary climate footprint and also offers economical advantages. The CO2SINUS project perfectly fulfils one of Professor Azzam’s principles: “I believe that science must always be of concrete benefit to people and the environment.”
