Global Water Treatment Technology Urgently Needs Innovation

The global water body area exceeds 70%, but less than 0.5% of fresh water is drinkable. As a necessity for sustainable economic growth, water resources are still the cheapest products available today. If 0.5% of them are used up one day, no matter how high prices are provided, no alternatives can be found. In terms of demand, we cannot expect the simultaneous growth in demand for water resources to coincide with population growth. In the past 100 years, the population of the Earth has doubled, but the demand for water has increased five-fold, and the pressure for water treatment has also increased dramatically.
If you want to modernize the global water system in the next 20 years, you are expected to invest 1 trillion yuan in funding. In addition, the renewal and maintenance of water infrastructure is also a huge potential capital expenditure. It is difficult for the government to consolidate and improve the water supply services alone. It is necessary for the business community to raise awareness of water scarcity and accelerate the innovation of response technologies. Previously, General Electric invested some of its funds in the development of filter equipment for sewage treatment systems, but this investment accounted for less than 2% of its income.
At present, the demand for water in the industrial water market is increasing. According to statistics, the consumption of water for daily drinking accounts for only 3% to 5%, and the rest is all for industrial, washing and other applications. According to experts, the world’s water treatment technologies are generally outdated and cannot keep up with the great changes in the demand for water resources.
Making full use of seawater desalination technology may be effective in addressing the tension in water demand. The reverse osmosis method is currently the most economical means of seawater and brackish water desalination. Reverse osmosis desalination method uses high pressure to make the water containing salt or contaminants flow to the semi-permeable membrane. The pores on the membrane allow water molecules to pass through, leaving salt and impurities behind, so as to achieve desalination or purification of sewage. This is the main lifeline for drinking water and industrial water in the Middle East, desert regions and island regions. The daily production of water desalinated by the use of reverse osmosis has reached 10 million tons, and this figure is expected to double again by 2015. However, a large amount of energy is also wasted in this process. At present, the most advanced reverse osmosis membrane desalinization rate is 99.8%, and only half of the desalination step has nearly half of the water flowing into the drainage system.
Another problem is membrane fouling. The cause of membrane fouling is that traditional pretreatment methods for reverse osmosis systems do not provide reliable inlet water quality, which allows many desalination plants to operate at much lower than their designed output. Nano reverse osmosis membranes are new technologies developed to solve the above problems. They will allow water molecules in aqueous solutions to pass under relatively low pressures, repel impurities and prevent them from adsorbing on the membrane surface, thereby saving energy and expenses. However, the technology is still in the laboratory stage, and the road to commercialization is not in sight.
Drainage pipe material also affects the effect of water treatment. Experts said that in the water conservancy industry, basically "the smaller the pipeline, the greater the profit." The municipal government's drainage pipeline has a small profit. How to reduce the cost of the drainage pipe and increase the water-passage rate has become a key technology urgently needed to be reformed. There is no “universal process” in the water treatment industry. In the pharmaceutical, semiconductor and other specialized industries, the water requirement is small, but the purity is very high. Therefore, the spearhead must be directed at the filtration equipment and use a more effective method than the conventional ultrafiltration membrane method. Technology to reduce pipeline fouling.
The end treatment of water resources must be combined with source control, and the level of water pollution cannot be increased due to the improvement of water treatment standards. The improvement of the water body index can not only reduce the burden of centralized treatment, but also ensure the centralized treatment of water quality. At present, there is a balance between emission standards and pollutant emission reduction in all countries, and efforts must be made to truly achieve clean production.
The issue of water resources should be put on the agenda both in technology and in the economic field. In this regard, mankind expects that technological innovation can change the fate of water, or it can be said to change the fate of mankind itself.

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