During the 7th IWA World Congress on Water Reclamation and Reuse in Brisbane from the 21st – 25th September 2009 PWN Technologies organized a workshop on the use of ceramic membranes for water reuse.

The workshop opened with Tony Fane, University of New South Wales, who covered fundamental aspects of low pressure membranes. He highlighted many of the issues associated with polymeric membranes and indicated some of the strengths of ceramic membranes. This presentation was followed by Jonathan Clement, Black & Veatch, who presented results from long term pilot testing in Stockholm and Singapore on ceramic membranes.

The results and data he presented demonstrated the high performance of ceramic membranes under a wide variety of conditions, including water reuse. The major barrier for the adoption of ceramic membranes has always been the high costs. Peer Kamp, CTO of PWN Technologies, presented a major breakthrough in the design of the ceramic membrane system. This design of the ceramic membrane block will reduce the cost of ceramic membranes at least to that of the polymeric system. This will be a revolutionary breakthrough in applying ceramic membranes.

The presentations raised a lot of interest in the audience and there was a vivid discussion about all kind of aspects on ceramic membrane application.