Chilean university specialising in renewable-driven membrane water treatment and adsorption cooling for arid, mining-intensive environments.
Universidad de Antofagasta is a Chilean public university located in the Atacama Desert region — one of the driest and most solar-radiation-rich environments on Earth. Their H2020 participation centres on sustainable energy engineering: water treatment using membrane technologies in mining contexts, and thermally-driven cooling systems powered by renewable or waste heat sources. Their research bridges two real-world pressures in arid, resource-intensive regions: the need to recover and reuse water in mining operations, and the need to cool facilities without adding electrical load. They bring a Southern Hemisphere field-testing environment and industrial mining-sector context that most European universities cannot replicate.
CO-COOL (2021–2026) involves collaborative development of renewable and thermally-driven cooling technologies with integrated thermal energy storage, directly matching UANTOF's arid-region cooling challenges.
REMIND (2018–2024) targets renewable-energy-driven membrane processes for water reuse specifically in mining industries — a direct fit for Antofagasta's copper-mining economic base.
CO-COOL keywords explicitly include waste heat recovery and cold thermal energy storage, indicating growing capability in industrial energy recuperation.
Both REMIND and CO-COOL share a renewable-energy thread — solar or waste-heat driving membranes and cooling systems rather than grid electricity.
UANTOF entered H2020 collaboration through the lens of water scarcity and mining: REMIND (2018) focused on membrane science and renewable energy sources for industrial water reuse — a very site-specific problem for the Antofagasta mining region. By 2021, with CO-COOL, their focus had rotated toward the thermal energy side of the same challenge: adsorption cooling, cold thermal storage, and waste heat recovery. The shift is from "how do we treat and reuse water using renewable energy" toward "how do we manage heat and cooling loads sustainably in hot, industrial environments" — a natural progression that deepens the thermodynamics expertise underlying both projects.
UANTOF is moving deeper into thermal engineering — cooling, heat recovery, and storage — suggesting future collaborations in industrial decarbonisation, solar cooling, and heat-pump-adjacent technologies would be a strong fit.
UANTOF has participated exclusively as a third-country partner in MSCA-RISE staff exchange projects, meaning they join large international consortia to exchange researchers rather than lead work packages or receive direct EC grants. Both projects sit inside consortia large enough to reach 28 unique partners across 13 countries, which is characteristic of MSCA-RISE networks. Working with them means accessing their physical location (Atacama Desert field conditions, active mining industry) and their academic staff for short-term secondments — not subcontracting deliverables.
Despite only two projects, UANTOF has connected with 28 distinct partners spanning 13 countries — a wide reach explained by the large, multi-institution nature of MSCA-RISE consortia. Their network is genuinely global, linking European research institutions with a South American university embedded in one of the world's most important mining regions.
UANTOF's location in Antofagasta — the heart of Chile's copper mining belt and a region with extreme solar irradiation and water scarcity — gives them a field-testing and industrial context that European partners cannot easily access. For any project needing real-world validation in arid, mining-intensive environments, UANTOF offers both the physical site and the industry connections. They also provide a Latin American entry point for European consortia that need third-country participation to qualify for MSCA-RISE funding.
