Water. Desalination + reuse
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/724419
36 Far Site September 2016 Water. desalination + reuse Water reuse market 'is ripe for disruption', say membrane innovators Subir Bhattacharjee, Water Planet chief technology officer (le ), and chief executive Eric Hoek, pose with their PolyCera flat sheet membranes and spiral monolith elements. When Water Planet bought the company PolyCera, it acquired a portfolio of nine patents and what chief executive Eric Hoek calls a "treasure chest of intel- lectual property". The patents, developed at University of California, Los Angeles, and at the California NanoSystems In- stitute, cover methods for mak- ing the PolyCera polymer into membranes of different types. In 2016, the company tested the new B100 series membranes in a six-week pilot project at an industrial work site set up in a remote location in Texas, USA, where temporary housing was provided for workers. Water Planet was partnering with a company that provides drinking water and wastewater services to this and similar work camps, where they aim to supply drink- ing water, and increasingly also want to accept wastewater and clean it up for reuse directly on the site. "They have mobile trailers that produce fresh drinking water and ice, and they col- lect wastewater from showers, sinks, toilets, everything, and they treat it biologically. They've been doing that for a few years," says Hoek. In a bid to improve the quality of wastewater for reuse, PolyCera membranes were installed on the back of the biological treatment process to further clarify the water of bio- solids and organics, to produce a higher quality of water for reuse. "We did a series of trials over six weeks, where we tested our membranes, and some other membranes, and we evaluated different operating conditions in order to understand how we would implement this at full scale with them," says Hoek. The pilot consistently produced wa- ter with turbidity below 0.1 NTU (nephelometric turbidity); and the bacteria and CFUs (colony- forming units) per millilitre were typically zero, with "a couple of readings of two", says Hoek. "To discharge water, the standard is that it has to be 75 CFUs, so we are destroying these water quality standards. We're providing such a high quality of water, and the sus- pended solids concentration, which is the aggregate of every- thing you can filter out of water, is effectively negligible because our filter is so tight it really removes all of this stuff," says Pilot results • Six-week pilot at temporary work camp in Texas consistently produced water with turbidity below 0.1 NTU • Water discharge standards are 75 NTU • Water Planet will now fit out mobile trailers with membranes to polish water for reuse in remote work camps CommerCial use • Water Planet is targeting three key market segments: membrane bioreactor applications, tertiary filtration, and industrial wastewaters with high BOD or high COD • Favours flat sheet membranes for industrial waters, because they tend to be more robust