Page 5 - Water and Fluid Separation News

For the past two years, California has been gripped in a historic drought, but things took a turn for the worse last month when measurements indicated 20% below normal precipitation levels and the worst drought conditions since record keeping began in the 1840’s. Governor Jerry Brown has declared a Statewide Drought Emergency and asked all 38 million California residents to reduce water use by 20%. Even President Obama has traveled to the state, offering Federal aid to those adversely affected by the drought. However, conservation may not be enough to ensure that there will be enough water in California to meet the demands of its population and industries in the long term.  California produces a third of the country’s vegetables and agriculture accounts for 80% of the state’s water use.  As California’s population continues to grow, and climate change threatens the state’s largest source of water, the annual snowpack on the Sierra Nevada, it falls to water technologies to help bridge

The existence of suspended solids and colloidal materials in feed water pose one of the biggest problems in reverse osmosis systems. To help combat this issue, Sterlitech is adding new simpleSDI kits to supplement its existing line of automatic and manual silt density index testing kits from GE. The new kits are available in automatic and manual testing versions and utilize 47 mm diameter, 0.45 micron MCE membranes to measure the degree of potential fouling in an RO system. To view Sterlitech's entire line of SDI kits as well as supplementary information about SDI testing, click here.

Water, whether seawater or freshwater, is rarely just H₂O.  Dissolved nitrites and nitrates in particular play a key role in the survival of aquatic flora like seaweeds.  In 2005, Matthew R. McIlvin and Mark A. Altabet devised a now common method to analyze the isotopic composition of nitrogen and oxygen dissolved in water in the form of nitrates and nitrites.  The method, which can be found here, requires the removal of all organic matter in the samples. The Grade F borosilicate glass fiber filter, with fine porosity, medium flow rate, and a 0.7 micron size particle retention, is the tool of choice for removing organic matter from water samples.

Sterlitech Corporation prides itself in manufacturing and marketing some of the most advanced filtration products around.  Our filters use materials like PTFE, PVDF, and PES, and others with inconveniently long chemical names that also make their synthetic nature really obvious.  But they're not going to be the focus of this story.  Instead, we will be shining a spotlight on three natural materials that, in addition to being quite tasty, make excellent filters: papayas, oysters, and coconut. Papayas Originally native to Mexico and Central America, the papaya is now grown in tropical regions around the world.  The papaya is usually eaten raw when it's ripe and used in cooking when it's unripe.  The seeds are edible as well, although they're surprisingly spicy. The seeds of the papaya are also the reason why papaya make such good filters.  A recent study published by a group of German and Nigerian Scientists used a combination of crushed papaya seeds and kaolinite clay

The world can change a lot in fifty years. Fifty years ago, there was no Zimbabwe, Hershey still sold chocolate bars for a nickel, and the Beatles were new on the scene.  Filtration technology has also been touched by the hand of time, improving with each new innovation brought about by a new application, driven by tightening standards and commercial demand.  Today’s industrial and scientific filters are capable of durability, specificity, and affordability that were only dreamt of 50 years ago. During the first half of the twentieth century, the filtration industry relied on natural materials such as wool, cotton, and wood fiber, which were usually supported by metallic screens, to make filters for a wide variety of applications.  But as the century wore on, the industrial processes that relied on filtration to either extract suspended solids or clarify a fluid began to demand ever increasing performance from the filters they used. Luckily, the filtration industry was able

It's no secret that water is essential to our lives.  Aside from the daily essentials like drinking or washing, water plays a role in many different industrial processes, whether it be as a solvent, a coolant, a medium for suspension, or in irrigation.  Water even finds its way into art with public fountains, water color paints, and ceramic pottery.  With so many uses for water, is it any wonder that so many places in the world are starved for it? The problem of increasing water scarcity led Jaffer Alali (pictured on the right) to develop the EcoMembrane as a potential solution and enter it into the University of Washington's (UW) Environmental Innovation Challenge.  Hailing from Saudi Arabia, Jaffer knows a thing or two about the difficulty of providing water to an arid region.  Before he began the EcoMembrane project at the UW, he spent over 10 years working in seawater treatment at Saudi Aramco and studied environmental engineering at the University of Alabama. The EcoMembrane