Danish membrane treatment startup Aquaporin A/S is preparing for commercial sales of its Aquaporin Inside™ membranes by the end of 2013.
Aquaporin has been producing its Aquaporin Inside™ membranes in-house until now by a manual process. With technology and budget in place, the company is now ready to accelerate plans by investing in a high-tech automated pilot production unit, which will reduce production times, secure consistency in product quality and take the company to the next level.
The company’s primary focus has been on ultra-pure water used in extreme applications such as medicine, biotechnology and in the production of semiconductors and flat panels. A secondary focus includes desalination of seawater and pressure-retarded osmosis applications.
“We are experiencing significant success with our numerous test partners in Europe, US and Asia, who provide valuable feedback on the membranes they are testing,” CEO Peter Holme Jensen says. “We use the feedback to optimize on our future product and adjust membrane specifications according to individual needs.”
“New water companies are on a running basis approaching us to order membranes for various applications, some of which we hadn’t even thought of ourselves,” Jensen adde. “The market has certainly become aware of the opportunities the Aquaporin Inside™ Technology is offering and we are quickly heading towards real market introduction”.
The Aquaporin technology has been the subject of two recent papers in the peer- reviewed journals Journal of Membrane Science and Desalination. In addition, researchers from NASA – Johnson Space Center, Huston, Texas, USA, demonstrated at the International Conference on Environmental Systems why the Aquaporin Inside ™ technology holds the potential of being used to purify water for cooling of astronaut space suits.
· An article about Aquaporin and its technology is scheduled to appear in the November/December issue of Desalination & Water Reuse.