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Highlights: Produced 306,806 gallons of potable water. No membrane scaling or antiscalant addition (reject Gypsum SI = 0.65). We won the More Water Less Concentrate contest.
End-user: Bureau of Reclamation
Partners: Olin College of Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
We brought our first field prototype to the Yuma Desalting Plant in July of 2022. We had two weeks to set up for a one week demonstration as finalists in the More Water Less Concentrate challenge, organized by the Bureau of Reclamation. The challenge was to concentrate scaling-prone brine from the Yuma BWRO skid, which treats water from the MODE canal to 75% recovery. Brine is pumped 22 miles away to an evaporation pond.
Over the course of the week we achieved 92% uptime and 83% recovery. Our team won the $150,000 grand prize.
Pleased with our performance, we kept the prototype in Yuma for long-term testing through July 2023. The operators at the Water Quality Improvement Center quickly understood our new process and were a great help.
Our first year-long field pilot concluded operating at an overall water recovery of 80% with no membrane scaling despite concentrating gypsum past supersaturation (SI = 0.65) and without additional antiscalant beyond what was already in the Yuma BWRO feed.
| 306,806 gallons of potable water production | |
|---|---|
| Feed | 6 g/kg |
| Brine | 36 g/kg |
| Recovery | 80% |
| Production | 2 gpm | 2880 gpd | 11 m3/day |
| Flux | 30 LMH | 17 gfd |
| Specific energy | 3.1 kWh/m3 @ 1 gpm |
| 1.65 kWh/m3 after resizing circulation motor (1hp to 0.25 hp) | |
| 0.8 kWh/m3 estimated at full-scale with best available equipment | |
| Membranes | Toray 4” BWRO |
| Membrane array | 2 in series |
| Circulation flow | 2.8 gpm | 0.6 m3/h |
| Pressure limit | 34 bar | 500 psi |
Test data from MWLC challenge | Report
Reclamation press release | Olin press release | Harmony update