A new source of water - capture of evaporated water
One of the major challenges of this century is the provision of safe drinking water for a growing population.
The shortage in water resources in arid areas requires the availability of more efficient and cheaper drinking water production processes. For groundwater, it is often sufficient to aerate and disinfect to produce drinking water. However, in large parts of the world the use of groundwater from aquifers is not possible due to excessive use and global climate change that allow penetration of salt sea water into the aquifers. Currently, there is no "waste" water vapor recovery from industrial processes. Using gas separation membranes, one is able to recover the water and, with a sufficiently selective membranes, produce purified water in one single process step. The advantages of the proposed process compared to traditional molecular separations are:
- high energy efficiency: no phase change is required to achieve separation
- temperature neutral to the source: making heat recirculation in industrial processes very interesting
- reliability: no moving parts
- small foot print: it generally easily fits in existing spaces, factories etc.
- environmentally friendly: no use of chemicals, no waste streams.
The objective within CapWa is to produce a commercially available modular membrane system suitable for industrial applications within 3-4 years. The produced demin water from this system should be competitive with existing demin water technologies.