18 minute read
FAVORITE PAPERS
Looking backwards - The Favorite Papers item has now appeared in four issues of Connections, a full year's worth. It's pretty interesting. Choices range from a whole book to a chapter in a book to published papers through presentations at conferences. One name appears once as author and twice as co-author! Read through the set and see if you can spot any trends or patterns. I cannot. These are pretty independent individuals.
Looking forwards - We never knew where this project would lead when IDA started it. We're still not sure but it has been in many ways satisfying and fun and also we hope for the readers and participants. But moving forwards we would appreciate some feedback and suggestions.
Sincerely, Jim Birkett
Dr. Jim Birkett, westneck@aol.com
Results from 99 seawater membrane autopsies
By Steve Chesters's
Authors: Stephen P. Chesters, Nuria Pena, Silvia Gallego, Maqsood Fazel, Matthew W. Armstrong, Fernando del Vigo, World Congress/Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre (PCEC), Perth, Western Australia September 4-9, 2011, REF: IDAWC/ PER11-297.
Nominated by: Dr. Mike Dixon
One of my favourite papers from the IDA manuscript database is Steve Chesters's "Results from 99 seawater membrane autopsies" from IDA World Congress in Perth, Australia in 2011.
I found the paper contributed a lot to Desalination's body of knowledge by showing practical results from a good many RO plants. It broke down the real-world problems experienced and showed the stats behind the most common sources of fouling. At the time I was working on the Adelaide Desalination Project and part of my role was to read as many papers as possible, both practical and academic and transfer the knowledge to the process engineering team. I had found at the time that many academic papers were very focused on the biofouling problem and continually claimed it to be poorly understood. This paper backed the statements of academia, showing that it was indeed a real-world problem. Now 10 years later, I believe we know far more about biofouling and believe it can be better prevented if we heed the advice of the membrane manufacturers and specialty membrane suppliers. In his paper, Chesters alludes to many ways to limit biofouling which reminds us that there is no silver bullet for biofouling. Thus we must adopt a multi-faceted approach.
Closely related to this paper was Hans Vrouwenvelder's paper "Biofouling of spiral-wound nanofiltration and reverse osmosis membranes: A feed spacer problem", published in Water Research in 2009. I found this paper to be very influential and polarizing among the academic community because the mechanism Vrouwenvelder proposed was very different to the standard biofouling model that considers biofouling developing on the membrane surface. I particularly enjoyed watching Tony Fane and Hans Vrouwenvelder heatedly debate the topic during a National Centre of Excellence in Desalination Australia (NCEDA) workshop in the proceeding months after IDA World Congress. I believe the dissemination
of the knowledge generated from Vrouwenvelder's thesis has greatly helped our industry better understand the biofouling problem evidenced in Chesters’s paper.
Coming back to the Chesters's paper itself, it has always stuck out in my mind not only for the content but also for the way he presented, which I found extremely novel at a conference. He noted at the beginning to watch for the "gold nuggets" which he strategically placed throughout the presentation to indicate the key messages, but actually placed images of gold nuggets on the slides.
About the Nominator
Dr Mike Dixon is a global expert in desalination and water treatment technology working with membrane and thermal technologies in Australia, North America, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Asia. Mike has worked across the entire value chain with technology manufacturers, water utilities, oil and gas companies, pharmaceutical companies and research hubs.
Mike is the CEO and Founder of Synauta Inc, a cleantech startup working with desalination innovators with a goal to reduce energy and chemical use using data science and machine learning.
Prior to Synauta, Mike was Chief Technology Officer for WaterNEXT (Western Canada's Water technology accelerator) and Applications Development Manager for NanoH2O, a global provider of reverse osmosis membranes that leveraged UCLA developed nanotechnology to lower the cost of desalination with over 300 installations in 40+ countries in the three years from market launch. LG Chem acquired NanoH2O in 2014.
Mike is experienced with the development of intellectual property and the commercialization of new technologies. He has more than 60 publications in international journals and is an author of several books and book chapters.
Mike is currently a Director of the International Desalination Association (IDA) Board. He has been an Editor of the IDA Journal and a reviewer for the Journal of Membrane Science and Water Research. Mike was National President of the Young Water Professionals for the Australian Water Association and in 2012 won the prestigious IDA Fellowship Award.
Narayan, G.P., Sharqawy, M.H., Lienhard V, J.H. and Zubair, S.M., 2010. Thermodynamic analysis of humidification dehumidification desalination cycles. Desalination and water treatment, 16(1-3), pp.339-353. Link: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/69156
Nominated by: Mr. Ronan McGovern
What paper served as inspiration to me on entering the field of desalination? It would have to be "Thermodynamic analysis of humidification dehumidification desalination cycles" by Govindan, Sharqawy, Lienhard V and Zubair. Quite simply, during my undergraduate studies, I took interest in studying thermodynamics in grad school. I considered different labs in universities across the US and this is the paper that led me to study under Prof. Lienhard at MIT.
I like thermodynamics because it is both applied (you can analyze stuff like desalination processes) while also being abstract (there are hard to grasp concepts like entropy). I see this applied and abstract thinking now in decentralized/crypto governance systems I'm involved with now too. Another reason I like thermodynamics is because my dad likes thermodynamics and I copied him.
One thing I learned at MIT is that my research in desalination was so applied it made more sense to start a company rather than stay in academia. I suppose this is the conclusion Prakash Govindan came to when he started Gradient with Anurag Bajpayee after MIT and I copied him a few years later in starting Sandymount. So, on the topic of inspiration, seeing people starting companies makes other people start companies.
In terms of inspiration beyond any one specific paper, I suppose the invention of polyamide RO membranes stands out. It was realizing the success of polyamide membranes in taking out thermal desalination that made me shift from thermal desalination for my masters to membrane desalination for my PhD. In some ways, polyamide membranes are so good that the growth of desalination has become public perception and permitting limited rather than technology or cost limited. Still, I suspect that someday we will see a radically different material replace polyamide - one allowing for improved size/ selection characteristics (perhaps more
useful for industrial separations than drinking water), reduced fouling rates and improved chemical resistance for cleanings. However, since the dominant roadblock for desalination is not technology, I also suspect such a new material could be twenty years from dominating the market.
About the Nominator
Ronan McGovern is a mechanical engineer and entrepreneur. He was co-founder and CEO of Sandymount Technologies, a 2016 spinout from Prof. John H. Lienhard's laboratory at MIT. Sandymount brought to market a multi-pass, ultra-high pressure reverse osmosis technology for beverage concentration that is known as Revos. Sandymount was acquired by Alfa Laval in 2020 and Revos was integrated into their Brewery Systems division. Ronan was also co-founder of Covid Response LLC, a hand sanitizer production business established and run in early 2020, with profits going to local US charities supporting low-income communities. Ronan is now supporting the roll-out of Revos at Alfa Laval while also writing at www.ronanmcgovern.com .
A Study of the Physical and Chemical Damage on Reverse Osmosis Membranes Detected by Autopsies
By Nuria Peña Garcíaa, Fernando del Vigoa, Stephen Chestersb , Mattew Armstrongb, Rachel Wilsonb, Max Fazelb
a) Genesys Membrane Products, C/ Londres 38, Oficina 204, Las Rozas, 28232, Madrid, Spain. b) Genesys International Ltd., 3ª Aston Way, Middlewich, CW 10 OHS, Cheshire, UK Presenter: Nuria Peña García. Laboratory Manager – Genesys Membrane Products S.L. – Spain npena@genesysro.es
Nominated by: Mr. Guillaume Clairet
Honestly, when Jim asked me to talk about my favorite paper, I simply didn’t know where to start since there are so many strong papers that have impressed me over the years. IDA and the broader water community is incredibly generous when it comes to sharing knowledge and I think this is one of the things I like the most about our industry. Since I started in this profession back in 2004, I have been privileged with the opportunity to participate in many conferences as audience but also serving on many Technical and/or Awards Committees and trying to remember a single paper/presentation that I consider my ‘’favorite’’ has been nearly impossible. I simply could not decide based on usual criteria what paper I liked the most, so I started thinking about the paper that had the most special impact on my career and then it became quickly very clear which one I was going to talk about.
The IDA congress veterans will all agree that IDA has a special touch when it comes to organizing events and that they have created unforgettable memories all over the world in some of the most incredible sites our planet has to offer.
However, they will also tell you that Tian Jin was an exception to the rule and that this one was not the best edition of the IDA World Congress. There are not enough words in this short article to explain the root cause of the shortcomings (which had nothing to do with IDA´s very capable staff by the way), but what is more important with the story at hand is to understand the depressed mindset of attendees at the end of the 4 days conference, so I must give you some background. The venue was too big and very far from all the hotels which meant all attendees were getting caught 1 to 2 hours in heavy traffic just to get in and out of the conference center making them late in the morning and exhausted at night. The local government entity failed to deliver on their financial and hospitality commitments and the meals and coffee breaks promised to delegates were either mediocre or inexistant. Something as simple as hauling a taxi back to your hotel was a 30 min ferocious challenge in the hot
and sweaty weather. All in all, it was not the best travel experience… yet, on the positive side, the quality of the technical papers presented by the IDA community was just as sharp as it had ever been. And of all those top-quality papers presented, Nuria Peña’s paper was crowned as the best of all and rewarded with a 5000$ cash prize. I was serving on the Awards Committee that year, so I know how tight the race to the final selection was. I won’t tell you in detail why this paper was so good, go read it yourself! :) Nevertheless, I will tell you why it had such a special impact on my personal career and on H2O Innovationas a company.
If there was one great moment during the Tian Jin Congress, it was the awards ceremony. Unfortunately, this ceremony is always at the end and a lot of people are gone by then, but the ones who stayed for that last day were finally able to enjoy a few laughs and a decent drink with their industry friends. More importantly, this is when Nuria received the Best Paper Award and just after the announcement there was simply magic in the air. The entire Genesys team went ecstatic; it seemed as if a volcano had erupted in the room as everyone shared their excitement and joy. The camaraderie you could sense among their team and the way in which they attracted the attention and healthy envy of industry peers was something rare and very special. It was very touching, it left nobody unaffected, surely not me… At that very instant, I became aware that the business culture at Genesys was very special and similar like the one we were building at H2O Innovation. And this is when I started to envision how we could collaborate in the future even though at that time we already owned a subsidiary, PWT, which was a competitor to Genesys. One thing led to another, fast track 7 years and in 2019, H2O Innovation acquired Genesys which has since then merged with PWT creating one large family of talented people with an amazing business culture centered around Care, Communication and Celebration!
Picture of the Genesys team at the time.
Realizing that this all started with one excellent paper is exciting, and the moral
of the story is just this: next time you write a paper for the Sydney World Congress, remember all the implications this may have down the road and the domino effect it can cause. Your hard work may impress a jury, which in turn could lead to an award and a celebration, which could get not only noticed, but also appreciated by others and could ultimately finish in a super important marriage (I often say a merger is like a marriage!) Many great things can come out of well thought research, well written papers and well delivered presentations. Thank you Nuria and thank you to all your co-authors for having changed the destiny of H2O innovation in such a positive way!
About the Nominator
Guillaume Clairet holds a Physics Engineering degree from Laval University, an MBA from the University of San Diego, and is a licensed Professional Engineer (PE) in Canada. In his early career, Mr. Clairet worked on projects involving groundwater remediation for the Canadian National Institute of Scientific Research (INRS). Since joining H2O Innovation in 2004, Guillaume has held multiple positions of increasing seniority in project management, sales, innovation & strategic business development. He has served in his current role as Chief Operating Officer of H2O Innovation since 2015 and he remains active in many industry associations (IDA, AMTA, WEF and WateReuse). Mr. Clairet has previously served for 8 years on the Board of Directors of the International Desalination Association (IDA). He is currently a mentor for the Imagine H2O water start-up accelerator and also serves on 2 advisory committees: for CentrEau (Quebec’s Water Research Center based out of Laval University) and for Osmoz (a Governement Program for financing water research & innovation).
Transport in Composite Reverse Osmosis Membranes
Lonsdale, H.; Riley, R.; Lyons, C.; Carosella, D., Transport in composite reverse osmosis membranes. In Membrane Processes in Industry and Biomedicine, Springer: 1971; pp 101122.
Nominated by: Mr. Chuyang Y. Tang
This 1971 paper by Lonsdale et al.1 provides fundamental insights into transport behaviors in thin-film composite (TFC) polyamide reverse osmosis (RO) membranes. TFC polyamide membranes feature high salt rejection, moderate water permeance, good pH tolerance, and excellent mechanical stability, which sets a golden standard for desalination and water reuse. However, these membranes face a strong tradeoff between water permeance and selectivity, commonly known as the “upper bound” in the membrane community.2 In this favorite paper, Lonsdale and co-workers revealed a new fundamental mechanism that limits the efficiency of water transport in TFC membranes – the “funnel effect”. According to these authors, for a thin polyamide film supported on a low-porosity substrate, water permeation through this thin film is largely dominated by the polyamide area directly above or near the substrate pores, forming funnel-like transport patterns. Since typical substrates used for TFC membranes have relatively low surface porosity of ~ or < 10%, the “funnel effect” could potentially reduce the available water permeance by an order of magnitude compared to that of an ideal “freestanding” polyamide film. Lonsdale and co-workers1 further developed a model to show that the negative impact of the “funnel effect” is stronger for TFC membranes with thinner rejection layers and less porous substrates.
We found this 1971 paper recently when we were preparing a critical review on the role of substrates in TFC membranes. I am simply fascinated by its classical style and fundamental insights. How much I wish that my student had shown this paper to me earlier! In the past few years, my research group has been working on interlayered thin-film nanocomposite (TFNi) membranes.3,4 We found that the inclusion of a highly permeable interlayer could effectively enhance the water permeance of a polyamide membrane by 6-7 times. It took us several years to find out the
1. Lonsdale, H.; Riley, R.; Lyons, C.; Carosella, D., Transport in composite reverse osmosis membranes. In Membrane Processes in Industry and Biomedicine, Springer: 1971; pp 101-122. 2. Yang, Z.; Guo, H.; Tang, C. Y., The upper bound of thin-film composite (TFC) polyamide membranes for desalination. Journal of Membrane Science 2019, 590, 117297.
reason – the inclusion of an interlayer effectively shortens the lateral transport of water inside the polyamide film and thus minimizes the funnel effect. If we had learnt Lonsdale and coworkers’ paper earlier, we would have saved a huge amount of experimental time!
The funnel effect described by Lonsdale et al. is also applicable to other membrane applications, such as forward osmosis, gas separation, and pervaporation. For example, in the context of gas separation, overcoming this effect by the inclusion of a gutter layer can lead to an order of magnitude enhancement in membrane permeance.5 I wish the membrane community could gain more fundamental insights from this classical work.
3. Yang, Z.; Zhou, Z. W.; Guo, H.; Yao, Z.; Ma, X. H.; Song, X.; Feng, S. P.; Tang, C. Y., Tannic Acid/Fe(3+) Nanoscaffold for Interfacial Polymerization: Toward Enhanced Nanofiltration Performance. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2018, 52, (16), 9341-9349. 4. Yang, Z.; Wang, F.; Guo, H.; Peng, L. E.; Ma, X.-H.; Song, X.; Wang, Z.; Tang, C. Y., Mechanistic insights into the role of polydopamine interlayer towards improved separation performance of polyamide nanofiltration membranes. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2020, 54, (18), 11611-11621. 5. Kattula, M.; Ponnuru, K.; Zhu, L.; Jia, W.; Lin, H.; Furlani, E. P., Designing ultrathin film composite membranes: the impact of a gutter layer. Sci. Rep. 2015, 5, (1), 15016.
About the Nominator
Chuyang Y. Tang is a Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD degree from Stanford University and has approximately 20 years’ experience in membrane technology, water reuse, and desalination. Professor Tang has published more than 280 journal papers, with a total citation of 19,600 and H-index of 80 according to Web of Science. His series works on novel membrane fabrication, permeability-selectivity tradeoff (the “Upper Bound”) of RO and NF membranes, and formation/tailoring roughness of RO membranes are well recognized by the membrane community. His invention of aquaporin-based biomimetic membranes has resulted in the successful commercialization of Aquaporin Inside Membranes (AIMs®) by Aquaporin Asia Singapore. Professor Tang’s R&D has been recognized by many prestigious awards, such as the inaugural RGC Senior Research Fellowship, the Singapore Ministry of National Development R&D Merit Award, and the International Desalination Association Fellowship.
Trends In Desalination Technology
By W. T. Hanbury
“Trends In Desalination Technology”, 2005, Porthan Ltd., U.K.
Nominated by: Mr. Tariq Nada
Because since reading Hanbury’s paper back book in 2006 and through this moment, every time I read it, I can see, derive, and predict the technical and commercial logic for trends in Desalination industry. On the first time of reading the paper, I had a sense of “there is much more here to understand” more particular on RO development.
The paper has enabled the reader to digest (3) time zones. Past, present and future, all relevant to “now”. The most pertinent part of this paper that makes me go back to it from time to time, is the how Hanbury defined Opportunities and Scopes for Improvements in Desalination Technology. As the time has gone on, all of these areas of development have been validated as he listed. Every time I read his analysis about the future of SWRO, more particular its associated Power Consumption it is clear that further progress in this area is more likely to entail capital cost reductions and scale-up of the pressure exchange devices that have delivered these lower energy consumptions rather than further dramatic energy consumption reductions. Simplification of pretreatment, possibly by the use of membrane filtration, probably holds out the greatest prospect for improved SWRO reliability and extension of membrane lives. Membrane restoration and cleaning techniques are another area in which significant progress may be possible.
This condensed paragraph always helps me to dig deep and understand more on RO desalination development, after breaking it down into the following pieces:
ʞ Scale - up of the pressure exchange devices ʞ Simplification of pretreatment ʞ Membrane restoration and cleaning techniques are another area in which significant progress may be possible.
Each of the 3 elements remains having an area to develop further, which do reflect on RO development. While global desalination average of around 3 kWh/ m3 is close to the performance seen at today’s best-performing SWRO plants, there are ways to drastically reduce the amount of energy going into each cubic meter of water handled, as defined in Hanbury’s paper as well as with digitally-assisted optimization.
Saying the above, Hanbury’s paper back in 2005 remains my personal favorite paper as time develop in parallel to RO development.
About the Nominator
Mr. Tariq Nada is serving ACWA Power as Chief Technical Officer – Saudi Portfolio. Acting as center of expertise providing an in-depth technical knowledge/support and using that knowledge to design and implement engineering solutions to feed into various of the asset life cycle from bid to asset operations to provide ACWA Power with the right guidance and steer from an engineering point of view.
Previously, he worked in the O&M phase at SWCC KSA and in R&D activities at Glasgow University.
In addition, he represents ACWA Power on multiple Board of Directors.
