A pilot project evaluating the Electro-Ceramic Desalination (ECD) technology developed by Membrion Inc. (Seattle, Wash.; www.membrion.com) successfully recovered clean water from the reject water of a reverse osmosis (RO) desalination process at a commercial manufacturing site.
Membrion’s technology uses ceramic membranes for ion separation in extreme environments where polymeric membranes would typically fail (see A New manufacturing approach for heavy-duty ceramic membranes, Chem. Eng., May 2024, p. 11). The company developed a method for shaping silica into ceramic membrane sheets with pore sizes suitable for ion-transport. An electric field, rather than pressure, drives the migration of ions.
For the pilot project, an ECD unit was installed at a Colgate-Palmolive (New York, N.Y.; www.colgatepalmolive.com) facility in Cambridge, Ohio, where it produced clean water for reuse over a four-week period from the facility’s RO desalination wastewater. The facility was chosen specifically because of its challenging water chemistry, says Greg Newbloom, Membrion CEO. The combination of RO and ECD concentrated the problematic ions in the RO reject water into a volume of 3 to 6% of the original water volume. Project leaders varied the water chemistry specifications required, and found that the ECD could deliver the water for reuse according to the desired properties, Newbloom said.
Based on the results of the pilot project, Membrion is now working with Colgate-Palmolive to expand the use of the ECD to several other facilities in water-stressed areas, with the goal of delivering 400 million gallons of water for reuse with the ECD across all the sites.
The pilot project was a part of the 100+ Accelerator program (New York, N.Y.; www.100accelerator.com), an industry consortium aimed at funding and developing sustainability-related technologies and approaches whose benefits could be shared across all member companies.