Groundwater and deep-well water contaminated with radium is mainly a problem in Middle East countries, where water is a scarce and precious resource. Currently, the conventional process for removing radium uses sand filters and polymer membranes, but they do not allow a targeted growth of cake layer during filtration. Moreover, chemicals have to be dosed via inefficient dosing systems, making high demands on the construction side and requiring high overdosing of chemicals in order to achieve radium removal rates of only 80%.
Cer@Sorp is based on this conventional process but adds ItN's flat sheet membranes which offer chemical pre-treatment and targeted cake-layer filtration.
The new combination of chemical process and ceramic flat membranes offers cost advantages with regard to the construction and operation of a water plant, and could also increases water quality so that costly and complex post-treatment such as reverse osmosis could be unnecessary. Using Cer@Sorp also enables making use of wells as a drinking water resource, whose water quality until now did not permit their use as sources of drinking water, ItN Nanovation says.
