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01/07/2021
OOWV practical partner in nationwide research project Extracting salts from water - and enriching groundwater Langeoog/In Nord west. Falling groundwater levels and increasing salinization of groundwater are challenges of the present and consequences of climate change. Solutions are the focus of a nationwide research project with the participation of the Oldenburg-Ostfriesischer Wasserverband (OOWV) under the leadership of the Technical University of Dresden. Therefore, a pilot plant will be installed in the Langeoog waterwork for eight months from the end of 2022. In particular, it will remove sodium and chloride from the groundwater near the coast in order to subsequently infiltrate it again for the purpose of groundwater recharge. The aim is to develop special membranes for this process, through which the water can be purified accordingly. "It won't be of drinking water quality afterwards," reports Yannick Tiemann, project manager on the OOWV side, "but it can be fed into the groundwater body afterwards." It is also conceivable that the treated water could be used for industrial purposes, thus conserving drinking water resources. There is still a long way to go before the first concrete results are available - the research project entitled "innovatION" is at its beginning. Initial results are expected in 2024. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. "During the eight-month pilot phase at the Langeoog waterwork, we will be responsible for supervising the plant and taking samples of different waters - meaning groundwater, process water and water from the pilot plant. We share the samples and the results obtained from them with the project partners for laboratory tests," describes Yannick Tiemann. "Due to the globally increasing demand for water and the decreasing availability of freshwater resources, there is a worldwide interest in efficient desalination processes," states the "innovatION" project description of the TU Dresden. "We are pleased to be one of the two practical partners, along with the Kreisverband für Wasserwirtschaft Nienburg," says the OOWV project manager.He has also already been involved in "MULTI-ReUse," a water reuse process in which treated wastewater is further processed to make it available to local industry. Here, the plans for a large-scale plant with its own supply network in Nordenham are concrete. The plant will save around one million cubic meters of drinking water per year. After all, not every industrial process requires the valuable water in drinking water quality.
22/03/2021
Research project develops sustainable, membrane-based water desalination processDue to the globally increasing demand for water and the decreasing availability of freshwater resources, there is a worldwide interest in efficient desalination processes. Freshwater that is influenced by the sea or by geogenic, i.e. natural, underground salt deposits often has high concentrations of sodium and chloride. High nitrate and sulphate concentrations usually result from agricultural influence. "Conventional desalination processes desalinate water completely and usually do not distinguish which salts are retained," explains Prof. Dr.-Ing. André Lerch, professor of the chair of process engineering in hydrosystems and coordinator of the innovatION joint project. "However, a complete desalination of the waters is often not useful, but only a reduction of the monovalent, singly charged ions."The aim of the innovatION research project is to develop an energy-efficient selective membrane-based desalination process for the targeted removal of monovalent ions from saline groundwater and surface water, and to examine potential applications and areas of use, taking into account water chemistry, economic and ecological aspects.innovatION stands for Selective Removal of Monovalent Ions from Saline Waters for Groundwater Recharge and Drinking Water Treatment. The joint project will be funded over the next three years by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research BMBF within the funding measure "Water Technologies: Water Reuse". innovatION brings together nine national partners from practice and science as well as two international associated partners. Within the framework of innovatION, selective membranes for specific retention of monovalent salts are being developed and installed in newly designed modules for use in an electrochemical process in laboratory and pilot plants. The plants will be used to carry out investigations to identify optimised process and plant parameters depending on different raw water qualities and treatment targets. The resulting effects and challenges for the different raw waters will be examined. The developed technology will be compared with international targets such as the sustainability goals using a holistic economic-ecological sustainability assessment in order to derive recommendations for action.By choosing partners from industry, science and practice, the consortium is able to build plants and test and evaluate the innovative technology on site with practical partners. Young scientists can be involved in cooperation and exchange with international scientists at an early stage. The results thus contribute significantly to securing water resources and further education, both nationally and internationally.
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26/07/2023
From July 23th – 26th the 10th “International Water Association Membrane Technology Conference & Exhibition for Water and Wastewater Treatment and Reuse” (IWA-MTC) was held in St. Louis, USA. Hanna Rosentreter presented the desalination results of the laboratory tests from the innovatION joint project. By combining nanofiltration membranes and standard ion exchange membranes as well as selective ion exchange membranes fabricated by the project partners themselves, the capacitive deionisation experiments at the TUD Dresden University of Technology showed a up to 14 times higher retention of monovalent ions compared to the retention of divalent ions. The comparison with international studies at the conference shows that selective desalination is gaining attention for a sustainable future, especially regarding energy consumption and resource consumption. Due to the high retention of nitrate and chloride compared to the hardly existing retention of sulfate, very high selectivity values can be measured within the innovatION project compared to other studies. The abstract of the presentation can be found here:
29/06/2023
From June 26th – 29th, the 13th European Symposium on Electrochemical Engineering ("ESEE") was held in Toulouse, France. The research areas represented range from energy storage and resource recovery to hydrogen and desalination technologies and fundamental electrochemical mechanisms at the nanoscale. In the session on electrochemical separation technology, the innovatION project was represented as a desalination technology. In his presentation, David Schödel outlined the methodology of the project-accompanying modelling and discovered outcomes, as well as some results from the laboratory experiments, which raise new questions for the modelling. In the subsequent discussion, interest was directed towards the principle of mMCDI and the membranes used, and other participants shared interesting experiences from their own projects in upscaling electrochemical desalination processes. An abstract of the presentation can be found as download:
23/04/2023
At this year's European Geosciences Union Conference in Vienna from 23 - 28 April 2023, the University of Oldenburg presented its research results to date in the innovatION project on the experimental and modeled geochemical reactions during potential groundwater recharge with a monovalent partially desalinated water using the East Frisian island of Langeoog as a case. In the form of a presentation in the session "Sustainable Groundwater Management in Water Stressed Regions" and a poster in the session "Integrating understanding across the land-ocean continuum: multidisciplinary approaches to studying saltwater intrusion and submarine groundwater discharge" the research project and its importance could be clarified, the network could be extended, and suggestions and feedback on the previous work could be obtained. Further information on the presented content can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-15634 https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-1392
24/11/2022
The Aachen Membrane Colloquium (AMK) traditionally takes place every 2 years. This year we were able to present our first interim results from the innovatION project on ion exchange membranes with a poster as well as in a pitch. At the AMK, in addition to membrane manufacturing methods, results on the use of membranes for water treatment and desalination were presented. Electrochemical membrane processes are becoming more and more important for desalination as well as for the recovery of valuable resources. The AMK is a suitable exchange platform for manufacturers, researchers and operators. We hope to be present again next year in Aachen - at the 15th Aachen Conference on Water Technology, which will take place alternately to the AMK - to present the latest results of innovatION.
24/11/2022
Euromembrane is organised by the European Membrane Society (www.emsoc.eu) every three years (2021 Copenhagen; 2024 Prague (https://euromembrane2024.cz/)) and is one of the largest membrane conferences in Europe. It primarily serves the exchange of knowledge between scientists. This year's Euromembrane was a special edition on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the European Membrane Society. The Euromembrane programme was very broad and covered many topics in the membrane sector, with membrane-based desalination methods being one of the focal points. First results on membrane development from the joint project innovatION could be presented in the form of a lecture.
21/09/2022
On this years MELPRO conference, the latest findings on the membranes and electrochemical processes have been discussed. After the last conference in 2020, which had to be organized as an online event, the participants from science and industry could meet in Prague to discuss recent research and development at presentations, posters and panel discussions. Also the goals and progress of the project innovatION, as well as the current state of the modelling have been presented by David Schödel.
12/05/2022
At POP-UP-WISSEN - Wissen schafft Dialog, a project of the Technical University of Dresden, innovatION was also presented on a poster in order to exchange information with the public and to answer questions on this topic. The aim of the project is, through POP-UP-WISSENsläden, decentralized events at POP-UP-WISSENsorten and virtual activities in the POP-UP-WISSENsnetz, to arouse the curiosity of the population in Weißwasser and Dresden, to answer questions and discover future topics. Further information on the "Wissenschaftsjahr 2022 Nachgefragt!" and "POP-UP-WISSEN - Wissen schafft Dialog"campaign is available here: https://www.wissenschaftsjahr.de/2022/ https://tu-dresden.de/kooperation/wissenschaftsjahr-2022
01/04/2022
From 16 to 18 of March the annual conference of "ProcessNet Fachgruppen Computational Fluid Dynamics, Mischvorgänge und Agglomerations- und Schüttguttechnik", which is organized with the DECHEMA, took place in Leipzig. Besides talks and presentations from attendees regarding fundamental science or industrial scale applications, the innovatION project was also represented by David Schödel. For the "Computational Fluid Dynamics" group a poster from a prior Master Thesis, describing the approaches to our mMCDI model was presented and discussed.
25/03/2022
From March 23rd to March 25th 2022, the conference of the Fachsektion Hydrogeologie e. V. of the DGGV (Deutsche Geologische Gesellschaft – Geologische Vereinigung) took place online, with the main topic "Groundwater - Climate - Society", in cooperation with the Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena. In the session "Artificial and natural groundwater reacharge" the PhD student Laura Bräunig and the Master student Mareike Schloo, Carl-von-Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, could present their first results from the project "innovatION" on the geochemical interactions during the infiltration of a monovalent-partially desalinated water into dune sediments of the East Frisian island Langeoog in two posters and flash talks. Likewise, the meeting showed the increasing interest in research on methods and techniques for groundwater protection and understanding of groundwater quality, as well as processes during infiltration through the vadose zone. This reinforces the motivation of the "innovatION" project for the development of a monovalent-selective membrane and the importance of understanding geochemical reactions during artificial groundwater recharge with product water.
07/07/2021
innovatION is a joint project which is focused on the development of a sustainable treatment and utilization of saline groundwater of the WavE-Network (https://bmbf-wave.de) of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.In July 2021 all WavE-Partners came together for a launch event. The goal and content of innovatION were presented with the following three posters.
07/07/2021
innovatION is a joint project which is focused on the development of a sustainable treatment and utilization of saline groundwater of the WavE-Network (https://bmbf-wave.de) of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.In July 2021 all WavE-Partners came together for the WavE kick-off event. Hereby, Prof. Dr.-Ing. André Lerch presented the contents and goals of innovatION.
