Water. Desalination + reuse
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/670678
| 10 | Desalination & Water Reuse | May-June 2016 BUSINESS _________ Ellen Bennett, Content Director ___ UCLA professor and star of the academic world Eric Hoek is bringing his innovative mindset to the business arena, blazing a trail on product development. He caught up with D&WR from his home in California ahead of the official launch of PolyCera, his latest baby. It's 9Am In CALIfoRnIA and Eric Hoek is speaking from his car. fresh from dropping his two pre-schoolers off for the day, the former UCLA engineering professor turned chief executive is ready to concentrate on his other 'babies' – the two divisions of Water Planet, the water tech company he started with private investment following his involvement in cleaning up the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of mexico. "I think of myself as having basically four kids right now," he laughs. "It's hard work, chasing after them, trying to protect and nurture them as they grow." the hard work is paying off. Water Planet has formed a number of strategic alliances with partners such as Air Liquide, Genesys International and Applied membranes that give it a global reach that belies its small scale. It has two proprietary products, Intelliflux and PolyCera. Both are gamechangers for the global desalination and water reuse industry. Intelliflux, originally developed at Water Planet and already at commercial stage, is an artificial intelligence based automation and control technology for filtration systems which effectively enables them to perform at a peak level that would be near impossible to meet consistently under human supervision. originally developed in Hoek's labs at UCLA, PolyCera, is a new super-material; a polymer that behaves in many ways like a metal. It combines the lower price of a polymer with the durability and performance of a ceramic membrane. It's no wonder Hoek is excited. He's not your usual chief executive. An engineering professor with a stellar academic record and a sideline in philanthropic projects, he does have a track record in business, having advised on the development of nanoH2o, which produces Quantum flux reverse osmosis membranes. But that was a very different experience, he says – he was only part time, retaining his academic role, and Welcome to Water Planet the business scaled up quickly – "it really became an operating company with 150 people before they'd ever made a profit." Water Planet, on the other hand, is very much his child. Hoek went down to the Gulf of mexico in 2010 to help with the clean-up of the oil spill. He became involved with some private investors, who were so impressed with his performance they effectively handed him a blank cheque. "It's a pretty unusual opportunity in life to not have to go pound the pavement and prove yourself in order to get that first cheque – we have very special founding investors who created such a unique opportunity. Hoek contacted his long-time collaborator and friend, Dr. subir Bhattacharjee, and Water Planet was born. After four years in the development lab, the nascent company was ready to launch the Ims-5000, a filtration system for treating oil and gas produced water and oily wastewaters. At the heart of the product is the Intelliflux control system – "software that we developed which allows it to learn autonomously and control itself completely, in other words, the control system uses artificial intelligence and it makes decision about how to change operating conditions, the pressure you apply, how frequently you backwash or clean the membranes. Effectively the system itself has sufficient intelligence that it operates the way a highly skilled and trained operator would do." "subir [Water Planet's chief technology officer who lead the development of Intelliflux at Water Planet] likens the leap from traditional control software to Intelliflux to that from cruise control technology to autopilot: With cruise control, you can set the rate that your car is moving but you still have to operate the steering wheel and the brake. What Intelliflux represents is autopilot, a completely autonomous vehicle that runs itself and you just sit and go along for the ride." the Ims-5000 is gaining traction in the oil and gas market, with a number of systems live, and Water Planet is ready to roll the Intelliflux control software out to other verticals. "the software represents a really gamechanging technology from an operational perspective and we've already tested it on membrane systems that other people have built. We've even recovered membranes that were really run into the ground, fouled up and clogged and lost their production. normally you would have to replace them with new membranes. We put Intelliflux on those damaged membrane systems and it recovers the performance of the membranes." that's a compelling proposition – and Hoek has some specific ideas about how it could be used in desalination, for example. "A lot of seawater desalination plants, particularly in the middle East, operate very nicely for 10, 11 months out of the year until something like a weather event or storm or wastewater discharge that produces an algae bloom near the intake of the seawater desalination plant. the biomass that forms in an algae bloom is so high that historically the way plants would deal with it was if they had the ability to "It's hard work, chasing after them, trying to protect and nurture them as they grow"