Water processing technology

Overview

Fresh water is a precious natural resource, essential for agriculture, energy generation, life and ecosystems around the world. With fresh water making up less than 1% of the world’s water, coupled with the ever-growing demand and increase in water pollution, the world is facing a serious water crisis. This has forced industries to reassess their water usage and seek alternative wastewater treatment methods with the aim towards zero liquid discharge.

Research activity

Desalination is one answer to this crisis and in CORA we have been conducting research into novel, low-cost processes based on osmosis. Some wastewaters, especially sewage, can be treated with anaerobic digestion to make biogas. This biogas can be fed to a gas engine to generate renewable electricity which more than pays for the cost of treatment. Encouraging and optimising this technology is one of our research interests. Hydrothermal carbonisation and ultrasound processing are other methods of wastewater treatment that are currently being investigated.

Facilities

We use a number of facilities for our research including:

• Pilot and bench scale Forward Osmosis, Reverse Osmosis, Nanofiltration systems
• Hydrothermal Carbonisation Reactor
• Ultrasound processing equipment (22-2MHz frequencies)
• Andor ixon X3 low light camera for imaging low light sonoluminescence
• Agilent ICP-OES
• Osmometer.