Water and Fluid Separation News

After months of living under the looming threat of “Day Zero”, Cape Town has tentatively pushed back the deadline of extreme water crisis for the remainder of the year. Day Zero, which had originally been scheduled for April 22, reflects the date when water levels in the city's major dams reaches 13.5% of their capacity. If this day arrived, taps would be shut off and Cape Town residents would need to stand in line to pick up their 25-liter daily ration of water.¹ For perspective, this equivalent to the amount of water consumed in a four-minute shower.²

Drought-driven water shortages are a worldwide crisis. The cities at highest risk to run out of water include Jakarta (where the city is sinking from illegal groundwater extraction as sea levels around it rise), Mexico City (where taps are already turned off for many city citizens for parts of the day), Tokyo, London, and Miami.³ In California, almost 50% of the state is currently experiencing

As cities and urban landscapes expand across the globe, water resource management continues to pose a huge challenge. Natural wetlands are often built over as cities grow, but a recent strategy of green infrastructure applies the opposite principle – wetlands are protected and constructed as part of city planning.

Wetlands, whether natural or man-made, act as large-scale storage and filtration centers for water streams. Beyond providing a habitat for wildlife and greenery in otherwise urban landscapes, they can remove many harmful contaminants from water, including heavy metals, excess nutrients, pesticides, and bacteria.¹

Wetlands can improve an area’s resilience to extreme weather by storing excess flood water. For example, the Staten Island Bluebelt Project created 400 acres of freshwater wetlands that resolved seasonal flooding issues and saved New York City the $300 million it would have required to accomplish this by constructing storm sewers.

These pilot skid systems are specifically designed for pilot testing of spiral wound membrane filters or small scale filtration processes. They offer more than 200 times the filtration surface available in standard bench-top filtration systems, allowing users to increase throughput and obtain results that translate for scale-up. Digital skids enable hands-free monitoring of process parameters and eliminate the need to manually record data.

Built in benefits include:
· Pre-assembled and plug-in ready
· Digital or analog options
· Customizable for chemical compatibility and application requirements

Pilot Skid systems are developed for the next level of testing, once investigators have established the proof of concept their bench-top filtration systems. Testing with the Pilot Skid allows the investigators to use full size spiral wound membranes for evaluating new processes

Leave it to Google to shine a light on our next generation of young scientists!  As we start getting ready for the 2017 academic year, Sterlitech decided to look back at last year’s Google Science Fair awards.  One group of clever kids caught our attention by winning the 2016 Scientific American Innovator Award with a subject near and dear to our hearts: filtration. They made filters from a unique source – waste Styrofoam packing! 

The trio of middle school students from Columbus, Ohio, came up with the idea after one of the three made a trip to Central America the prior year.  The student was surprised at the volume of Styrofoam trash that littered the beaches and wondered if there was something that could be done.  Further research into the use

Aquaporin hollow fiber membrane modules for forward osmosis studies are now available from Sterlitech. AQP HFFO2 is a cross flow membrane module containing Aquaporin Inside™ hollow fiber membranes. With an Aquaporin Inside™ coating on the interior surface of the hollow fibers (lumen side), the feed solution is circulated in the lumen and the draw solution is circulated in the shell.

The Aquaporin Inside™ technology is based on the aquaporin protein, nature's own selective and extremely effective water channel. Aquaporin water channels have been developed through billions of years of evolution, and are now ready to revolutionize industrial water treatment.

Forward osmosis (FO), also known as engineered osmosis, is a membrane separation process that takes advantage of the pressure gradient between two solutions of different concentrations to move

Filtering organic solvents for applications such as HPLC buffer prep can be challenging in order to ensure chemical compatibility with filters (PVDF, Nylon, or PTFE), preserving longevity of an HPLC column, or containment of toxic fumes, but finding a suitable and comprehensive vacuum system is now easier than ever.

Sterlitech is now offering a comprehensive benchtop vacuum system, the Rocker-VF12 Kit, targeted to the purification of organic or corrosive liquids such as mobile phase solvents for HPLC analysis. Each kit comes complete with a PTFE-coated Rocker 300C Pump, silicone vacuum tubing, and a 300 mL capacity, 47 mm diameter glass filter funnel assembly connected directly to a GL45 waste bottle. The system

Membrane filtration is an effective way to remove pollutants and microorganisms from water and wastewater. However, membrane fouling lowers efficiency over time when considering rejection values and water flux.  Fouling is typically biological or particulate; fouling rate is a function of the membrane pore size relative to the size of the foulants and also the interactions between the membrane and the foulants. Membrane surface charges and affinity for water directly affect membrane biofouling intensity. Applying electric charge to the membrane surface is one of the methods that has been recently trending for mitigating biofouling [1]. Use of an electroconductive nano-carbon-based membrane has also been reported for mitigating membrane fouling by integrating membrane filtration [2].

In an effort to meet the demand for a cross flow cell that allows users to apply alternating voltage to a flat sheet membrane, Sterlitech recently developed an

Purchase of each package listed on the sheet below includes one carboy, the standard closed-cap and open-cap adapter as well as two additional Quick-Connect VersaCaps, one with 2 hose-barb ports and one with 3 hose-barb ports for easy filling, siphoning, and/or venting.
Carboy Special Promo Details 

The use of polymeric membranes for filtration of non-aqueous solutions started around 1960 and has been developed significantly since then [1]. Today, non-aqueous membrane filtration applications in chemical and pharmaceutical processing account for more than 25% of the global total polymeric membrane market [2].

To put into perspective the potential significance of membrane filtration for non-aqueous solutions, one must realize that conventional separation processes still accounts for up to 70% of capital (CAPEX) and operational (OPEX) expenditures in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries [2,3]. Therefore, to reduce CAPEX and OPEX, developing membrane separation processes that can be more efficient and cost effective than conventional separation processes has been of great interest for these industries and a growing field of research.

Sterlitech has observed this growing demand from the research community for solvent resistant membranes that can be used in non-aqueous

How about a nice tall glass of ice-cold beer… made from recycled sewage water?

Did you hesitate? Well, now let’s think about it: most breweries use some combination of hops, malted barley, yeast, and…. well… clean water! But beer from recycled wastewater? That’s exactly what took place March 19-10 at the 2017 WateReuse California Annual Conference in San Diego. The City of San Diego’s Pure Water San Diego program hosted a fun competition event at the conference, where they asked homebrewers to concoct their favorite pale ales or IPAs using water exclusively sourced from the reuse program, and then offer samples of the created goods to attendees.

In addition to the competition, local San Diego breweries such as Stone Brewing and Ballast Point also showed off a few specialty brews made from water sourced from the program and offered samples to attendees. So how did this process work?

The program in San Diego uses what is known