Novel Effluent and Chemical Treatment Using Molecular Sieves and Membrane Filtration Technology

We developed this approach to tackle the problem of treating a wide spectrum of complex heterogenous downstreams or wastewater effluents produced in the manufacturing, chemicals processing sectors in such a manner as to maximise global process water recoveries, minimize produced retentates and the use of dosing reagents, while recovering the sequestered molecular species in the effluent for reuse in a net near-zero discharge process. Our approach creatively deploys a superposition of regenerative hydrophobic molecular sieves and adsorptive media that are targeted to remove molecular contaminants from a particular effluent profile as a front-end pre-treatment unit process, with in-situ elution-based regeneration, in conjunction with a secondary, pH resistant ceramic membrane filtration unit process. This unification of molecular sieve and membrane filtration unit processes in sequence as a generalised solution has not been explored in industry or proposed in the literature to date. Our solution is generalisable and allows a large spectrum of potential wastewater chemical effluents and waste streams with water content in excess of 90% to be treated and remediated systematically through targeted contaminant molecular species (some of which possess commercial value) being sequestered and recovered in concentrated form for reuse or secondary offload.