- 14 April 2008 -

New process could replace sand filtration

Inge AG says its latest method of treating drinking water, set to replace sand filtration, is ultrafiltration with multibore membranes.

The company has designed a kind of ultrafiltration based on long, white, thin plastic capillaries which engineers call “macaroni”. The delicate tubes consist of a membrane that only lets through water molecules, but not viruses, germs or bacteria. These undesirable elements are larger than the water molecules and are simply unable to fit through the ultra-fine pores.

Inge AG has arranged seven of these “macaroni tubes” in a similar fashion to a honeycomb and combined them into a single "multibore capillary". According to the company, however dirty the water is that they have to clean, the fibres of this honeycomb-shaped membrane do not break, which means that the water they filter maintains the same degree of top-quality cleanliness.

By forcing dirty water into these capillaries under pressure, clean drinking water can be created. The fact that the other end of the tube is sealed with a layer of resin means that the water can only escape through the walls of the membrane where it emerges free from germs or particles of dirt.

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