By John — Desalination News
ACWA Power, the Saudi-based developer that operates more desalination capacity than any other private company in the world, used its Innovation Days event in Riyadh to announce five new research partnerships aimed at next-generation desalination technology, spanning gravity-driven vapor compression, advanced reverse osmosis membranes and artificial-intelligence-driven plant optimization.
The announcements grouped a mix of academic and corporate partners around specific technical problems that have long constrained how cheaply and efficiently seawater can be converted into drinking water. With Water Global Access, ACWA is exploring Gravitational Vapor Compression Desalination, a thermal technique that uses gravity rather than mechanical compressors to drive the vapor-compression cycle, aiming to cut both energy consumption and the cost of producing fresh water. Separately, the company is working with NexT Membranes, a venture associated with the University of California, Los Angeles, on a new class of reverse osmosis membranes known as TFX, designed to resist the compaction that conventional membranes suffer under sustained high pressure; a membrane that holds its structure under prolonged ultra-high-pressure operation could, in principle, extract more fresh water from each pass of seawater than today’s commercial membranes allow.
A third partnership, with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the Harmony Desalting banner, is focused on a batch reverse osmosis system that runs in a closed-loop, cyclic-pressure mode rather than the continuous-flow process used in nearly all commercial reverse osmosis plants today. The approach is intended to improve how much fresh water can be recovered from particularly difficult feed water, such as high-salinity brines, while reducing both energy use and the volume of waste brine that has to be disposed of. ACWA is also partnering with Huaxin Nano on anti-fouling reverse osmosis membranes engineered to resist the organic and inorganic deposits that gradually clog membranes in service, a persistent maintenance cost across the industry, and with Aleph Tech on artificial intelligence tools intended to optimize energy consumption across large-scale desalination plants in real time.
None of the five partnerships has yet produced a commercial product or a specific project, and ACWA has not disclosed performance figures, timelines or the scale of investment behind any of them. Taken together, though, they illustrate the range of problems the company is trying to solve simultaneously as it expands a desalination fleet that already produces more than four million cubic metres of water a day: lowering the energy intensity of thermal plants, extending how hard reverse osmosis membranes can be pushed before they degrade, squeezing more usable water out of difficult brines, and using software rather than hardware to trim costs across plants already built. ACWA’s own prior disclosures have pointed to steadily falling production costs across its newer seawater reverse osmosis plants, and the company has previously said it sees further technology-driven cost reductions as central to keeping desalinated water affordable as it takes on an increasing share of water supply across the Gulf and beyond. Whether any of the five lines of research announced in Riyadh translates into a working plant upgrade will depend on results that, for now, remain confined to the laboratory and pilot stage.
(Source: Smart Water Magazine)