Reverse osmosis has been around for a long time and is used on boats everywhere for desalination. This sounds like a new membrane that requires less pressure and thus energy? I guess sieve sounded better?
Sieve not only sounds better, it's also more informative to the general public - gets across not only what it structurally looks like, but also gives a general idea of how it functions.
In terms of what's new about this - yeah, less pressure and less energy. On boats the prospect of lugging around your own fresh water makes even relatively heavy and power-hungry desalination plants worthwhile, but land-based installations are very much limited by capital costs and energy usage.
RO membranes are notoriously finicky and non-robust. They require a lot of maintenance and can be ruined by common chemicals like chlorine. A more robust desalination membrane would be a very good thing.
When I was involved in RO in the early eighties, that was exactly the issue. In the context of offshore drilling rigs, we just couldn't get the adherence to protocol around flushing and filtering that the units needed to work over a reasonable lifetime.
We eventually gave up and went with an Alfa-Laval heat exchanger based approach.
Likely the issue is, with a large RO plant you hire people for the specific domain knowledge and develop a work culture around it. For a place like an oil rig none of this specific domain knowledge is central to the work at hand. So the technology isn't reliable in that context.
Exactly. It was a small scale system and the rig mechanic or whoever was supposed to do it as one of their 100 or so responsibilities so it often wasn't done. It was also pretty much a V1 system so it was just very sensitive.
To set some context that people here might appreciate, there wasn't a single computer or data link to offshore drilling rigs at that time. We were just starting to play with radio modem links.
I suppose it's probably something along those lines or the fact that the end product doesn't(to my knowledge) reflect the RO unit working correctly. With pharma they need RO to feed to WFI to use to make the drugs or do their research and it needs to work every day. Still seems like a simple RO system with a basic PLC would work fine on a ship to supply drinking water.
I don't know much about the situation at all but a sieve should be gravity fed (with an expectation of a reasonable throughput), RO is pumped under additional pressure AFAIK.
