Singapore pilots new system to treat industrial wastewater

A new membrane water treatment system to treat industrial wastewater built by a collaboration of Separation Technologies Applied Research and Translation (START) Centre and Memsift Innovations is currently in the pilot phase in Singapore.

It is claimed that this new system is likely to reduce the liquid waste by 90%.

To be located in a semiconductor company in Singapore,  the plant can recover precious metals from the industry wastewater.

The novel water treatment system used by the pilot plant uses a new type of hollow-fibre membrane, which is invented by Professor Neal Chung at the National University of Singapore.

This membrane has been assigned to and progressed for industrial application by the START centre.

The former holly fibre membrane resembled noodles with hollow core, however, the new novel membrane system is a tri-bore membrane with three hollow cores. This model allows a water flow that is 30% higher than the older membrane.

Separation Technologies Applied Research and Translation (START) is a national level facility to build and commercialise separation and filtration technologies.

Memsift Innovations is a local technology firm that focuses on zero-liquid discharge water treatment systems.The average retention using the tri-bore model is expected to be 1.6m litres/year. This retention can save the disposal cost up to $250,000.

90% of the industrial wastewater will be filtered into clean water and the metal waste will be extracted from the same to be reused and sold to other companies as well.

START centre managing director Dr Adil Minoo Dhalla said: “This is the first successful licensing agreement achieved by the national-level centre since it started in 2016, which seeks to turn cutting-edge membrane research from Singapore’s universities into real products usable by multinational and local companies.

“This pilot plant marks the first of many local water innovations which START is translating for commercialisation. Using our cutting-edge membrane fabrication, module design and testing facilities, we are able to scale up novel technologies from Singapore’s institutes of higher learning rapidly and to test them in real-life environments to validate their commercial value,” added Dr Dhalla.

This plant is expected to be launched in the second quarter of 2019. If the pilot programme of this technology proves advantageous, the plant shall be commercialised.

Once the pilot tests are successful, Memsfit will receive a full licence from NTUitive and commercialise it together with its proprietary solutions.