Wednesday 15 June 2016, during the LET conference in Jerez de La Frontera in Spain, PWNT’s CEO Jonathan Clement presented his keynote on ‘Pre-treatment with Ceramic Membranes for Desalination’ with acknowledgement to PUB, METAWATER and WABAG. Jonathan emphasized to start with the right questions for desalination pre-treatment as: What do we want specifically for desalination pretreatment, robust capable of withstanding chemical composition of sea water, high recovery, compact, Integrity – capable of enhancing and protecting downstream treatment.

Based on the pilot testing results at PUB’s TUAS facility in Singapore, which operated from June 2015 – June 2016, he endorses the advantages of PWNT’s developed innovative and compact ceramic membrane filtration system, CeraMac®, a good alternative for sustainable desalination pre-treatment, in relation to the use of conventional systems. The sustainable ceramic membranes developed by PWNT’s partner METAWATER Japan, operate in Japan already for 18 years successfully. Ceramic membranes feature long life expectancy of 30 years, capability to use strong cleaning chemicals and oxidants, no risk of fiber breakage, very narrow pore size distribution, can be operated with very high backwash rates and BW pressure, minimal pre-treatment and can handle high turbidity and high solids waters.

The pilot testing resulted in a highly stable flux at 170 lmh with limited chemical cleaning. CeraMac® is very compact compared to other alternatives.