Water and Fluid Separation News
-
June 26, 2013
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
-
June 13, 2013If you've ever wanted to see a bit of reverse osmosis in action, here it is. In this video, we use CF042 Acrylic Cell to separate blue dye from water. This demonstration is run at 200 psi and uses a Toray 70UB reverse osmosis membrane to achieve separation. Also making a cameo appearance in this video is the HP4750 Stirred Cell, which is being used to hold up the tubing, but is not actually part of the separation process this time. To learn more about the products featured in the video, just visit our website:
-
May 29, 2013
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
-
May 29, 2013
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
-
April 29, 2013
The name Lockheed Martin invokes images of high tech aircraft, secret weapons, and other technologies that seem a whole lot more exciting than a reverse osmosis (RO) membrane. However, Perforene™, Lockheed Martin’s latest innovation, promises to be an exciting new development for RO desalination. It’s made from graphene, an allotrope of carbon where the atoms arranged in hexagonal cells to make a sheet that is only one atom thick. The next thinnest RO membrane is about 500 times thicker than Perforene™. It is the almost impossible thinness of the membrane that makes it so exciting for RO; it takes about 100 times less energy to push water through the membrane when compared to the average RO membrane available commercially today. The Perforene™ membrane was developed by
-
March 05, 2013After nearly ten years of legal wrangling, the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort was given the green light to use reclaimed wastewater to make artificial snow for the first time this winter. It is also the first ski resort in the world to do so, taking its water from treatment facilities in nearby Flagstaff, AZ. It’s definitely a novel use for wastewater and, if it proves successful, it may help combat the stigma against the use of reclaimed wastewater in other applications where human contact may occur. Unfortunately, the first run of snow sprayed onto the slopes was yellow. Face-planting into a pile of yellow snow made from reclaimed wastewater is an icky proposition. Joking aside, the discolored snow raises serious questions about the potential health and environmental impact of spraying wastewater effluent onto the slopes. Some studies have shown that the effluent contains traces of pharmaceuticals, hormones and other chemicals which are not regulated by current water quality laws.
-
August 16, 2012
In space, no one can hear you pee… But you’ll be able to safely drink it down again after it’s gone through the International Space Station’s Water Recovery System. According to NASA, the Water Recovery System, carried to the ISS by the space shuttle Endeavour, can recycle up to 93% of the water fed into it and reduce overall water consumption aboard the space station by 65%. However, the Water Recovery System has been experiencing problems with calcium fouling, which led NASA to contact Saltworks Technologies of Vancouver, CA. Saltworks was contracted by NASA to build and deliver a pilot device that would test water recovery systems and may potentially be used aboard the ISS itself. If successful, the system will be the latest of Saltworks’ unique water treatment solutions. One such solution is the proprietary Thermo-Ionic process for desalination. This process can reduce energy costs by up to 80% in comparison to more traditional methods
-
July 31, 2012
Aquaporin A/S of Denmark, one of Sterlitech Corporation’s customers, has recently tested their Aquaporin Inside™ technology at the NASA Ames facility at Palo Alto, CA. Aquaporin and their new technology take their names from a type of protein found in the cell membranes of every living thing on the planet: aquaporins. Aquaporin (the company) hopes to use the selectivity of aquaporins (the protein) to create cost-effective and ecologically sustainable new membrane filters to revolutionize water purification and desalination.
[/caption] The secret to the promise of Aquaporin Inside™ technology
-
July 17, 2012
The Autofil™ Laboratory Filtration System is the latest entry in a long line of innovative filtration products from Sterlitech Corporation. Vacuum-operated and designed to eliminate spills and contamination, the Autofil™ System features an ergonomically designed bottle and a stable base that enables hands-free operation. This makes the system ideal for the preparation of buffer, tissue culture media, microbiological media and other biological fluids. The complete system consists of a disposable Autofil™
-
April 20, 2012When you flush the toilet do you ever think, “Man, all this good stuff is just going to waste?” Ok, probably not. But in the future your home or office may be partially heated by that human waste, thanks to geothermal sewage. What exactly is geothermal sewage, you cringe? It’s the process by which the heat from a wastewater line is repurposed to heat a nearby facility such as a hotel or apartment building. The heat transfer is accomplished by filtering solids from the wastewater and passes through a heat pump before reaching the building. In China geothermal sewage has already been installed in a few buildings, including the Beijing Train Station. Now a wastewater treatment facility in Philadelphia is beginning the first US trial with this technology. It is a company in Philadelphia, NovaThermal Energy, that is making geothermal sewage possible by developing a proprietary filter material that can efficiently remove