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[Music]
today’s episode is sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind the rising tide Mastermind is where people just like you
get together every week to help each other with issues let’s face it issues
are hard so why start from square one when somebody can tell you what they’ve
done with a similar issue if this sounds like something that’s interesting to you
go to scaling up h2o.com Mastermind to see if the rising tide
Mastermind is right for [Music]
you welcome to the scaling up H2O podcast the voice of the industrial
water treatment industry and of course your favorite water treatment podcast my
name is Trace Blackmore and I am the host of the scaling up H2O podcast and
Nation how is it that we are getting ready to say goodbye to the month of
November I always do something special for the beginning of the year and of
course that was many many months ago it seems to me like it was just yesterday
so I’m wondering is your year going by as quickly as my year and it probably
is that the answer that you are saying as you’re talking back to this podcast
is yes it is going just as fast if not faster so that lets us think we really
need to savor events when they happen when we learn something new we need to
savor that all of the things that we experience day by day it’s very easy to
get caught up in the daytoday and not celebrate all of those new things all of
those significant things so here’s my ask for everybody in the scaling up
nation that you take a moment and you acknowledge significant moments when
they happen and maybe there’s a moment that you don’t think is too significant
but it’s never happened to you before so make it significant and acknowledge it take a moment just to think wow I am
growing as a person I am growing as a professional and it’s my hope as you
celebrate Thanksgiving that you give thanks to all of the people that are in
your life that make your life so special somebody told me when they were talking
about the art of accumulating stuff within one’s life that sooner or later
all that stuff goes back in the Box yes folks you can’t take take it with you
and when you really account for all the things that matter it’s all about
relationships so celebrate all the relationships that you have that make
your life worthwhile now I got to thinking when did it get decided that
Thanksgiving in America was going to be the last Thursday in the month of
November well that was in 1863 and president Abraham Lincoln was
the one that declared this and of course this was in recognition to the 3-day
Feast of harvest shared by the pilgrims and the indigenous people back in
1621 so there you go relationships two cultures that should not have gotten
together they had all these differences they could not speak the same language but they not only shared a meal together
that meal lasted 3 days wow aren’t you thankful that your Thanksgiving is not
lasting 3 days so think to yourself what are all of the relationships that you
are thankful for I am going to go right out and say it I am thankful for you
being part of the scaling up Nation this is episode
3309 can you believe that I can’t believe this as I am staring at my
recording equipment and I’m thinking of how many times my recording equipment has gotten upgraded over the years I
hope you can hear that as you’re driving from account to account but it allows me to think back to my very first day when
I didn’t have any recording equipment and I used a Bluetooth headset hooked up
to my computer and that was episode one and I think back from episode one where
I knew absolutely nothing about creating a podcast to today where I have learned
so much about podcast creation and I did not do that alone so many people within
the podcasting Universe have helped me with information that I didn’t know I didn’t know but because I go to
conferences and I try to reach out to people of podcasts that I really respect
and I ask them questions how do I get better what are some things that you do that might make me better and it is
amazing how that dialogue just flows from there so I am going to ask that if
you do not have just an amazing wealth of people that you can
call about any issue don’t stop meeting people don’t stop giving to people so
they want to give to you that’s a mindset we have in the rising tide
Mastermind and of course I talk about the rising tide Mastermind quite a bit on the show because I’m so proud of it
that is a group where we get together on a regular basis to help solve each other’s issues but I ask each and every
member to come with a full cup mentality and the full cup mentality is my cup is
full because I want to fill someone else’s cup and if we all come with that
Full Cup mentality well somebody’s cup is overflowing and that’s how every
interaction should be however when you just show up and you want people to fill
your cup there’s not enough to go around nobody’s cup is
overflowing and each and every one of us has the ability to bring more than what
we’re expected to and I tell you when we do that that just ignites others to do
the same and that’s a group that I’m I want to be a part of that’s a group that
I am thankful to be a part of and I’m going to thank all of the members of the
rising tide Mastermind not only for being a member but for coming with that
Full Cup mentality and for helping me with the issues that I have and making
this show better and all of the things that I bring each and every week I want
to thank you because I am a better person because I am part of that group
so Nation maybe the rising tide Mastermind is right for you maybe another group is right for you but I’m
going to tell you there is a right group for you out there and if you are not
looking for that group life is too difficult to do it alone when you join a
group you get further faster while having more fun and I urge everyone out
there to have a group of trusted advisers whether it’s the rising tide Mastermind or not I have seen how these
groups come together and I have seen what it does to the individuals within
that group and folks I cannot imagine my life without a group like that something
else I want you to consider is how are you bolstering your knowledge how are
you meeting new people within our industry and a great way to do that
is to go to our events page where we have every water event that we are aware
of for your viewing pleasure so you can schedule your next conference heck you
might want to schedule your next 12 conferences because we have so much information out there so December 5th
through 7th in Denver Colorado is the North American water loss conference and
Expo the North American water loss conference and Expo will offer attendees approaches to reducing non-revenue water
regulated developments and a platform to share processes methods and techniques
with everybody there this event is hosted by the American Waterworks Association and the only thing that’s
missing is you and if you want to find out how you can go to that conference we’re going to have all of that information on our events page and you
can simply click over to read all about it and we’ve actually got calendar
invites where you can click and it will put all of the conferences that you want to attend right in your calendar right
there what a great gift the great staff at the scaling up H2O podcast has given
to all of us another conference taking place December 10th through 12th is
happening in Rwanda and that’s the 8th International Water regulations Forum so
perhaps that’s something that you might want to attend that’s hosted by the internet ational Water Association and
we’ll have all of that information on our events page finally January 20th
through 24th in Chicago Illinois the 2024 ashray Water conference is taking
place and we will have that information for you on our events page Nation do you
know of a conference that we have not mentioned on the show or maybe we don’t
know about it so if you have that information please get that to us how do you do that well you can do that just
like you do when you have a show or guest idea that’s by going to scaling up h2o.com going over to our show ideas
page and letting us know whatever your idea is even shows that we do not know
about conferences that we do not know about once we get that we will add that
to our system and we can share that with the entire scaling up Nation when
something that I did recently was I was the keynote speaker for the
International Water conference and I have so many new friends because of that
endeavor and you’re going to meet one of my new friends today I hope you enjoy
the interview my lab partner today is Jane
Cera of nowco and Eco lab she’s a senior industrial technical consultant and we
are so happy to have you here on the scaling up H2O podcast welcome Jane
thank you trace it’s great to be here and looking forward to a wonderful time discussing our mutual understanding of
water treatment and reverse osmosis and I cannot think of a greater topic to
talk about we’re just going to have so much fun about it all right looking forward to it before we do that though
can you tell the scaling up a bit about yourself okay well my name again is Jane
Cera I am a regular person I enjoy photography travel Formula 1 racing my
favorite thing has been to three races in Australia Monaco and Canada which
were really fun and what I do for a living is I design water and wastewater
treatment plants and I really enjoy that I enjoy my family my significant other
Paul and my three cats how about that well I’m curious how does somebody fall
into this industry I love asking that question because it’s like snowflakes there’s a different answer for everybody
oh boy this was totally by accident I was going to graduate school at
UCLA and I had a research assistantship as part of my scholarship so I went to a
professor and I said I’d like to work for you in non-equilibrium
thermodynamics and he said I don’t have any government money so go down and talk
to Julius glater down in the seawater lab he’s got plenty of money so I went
down there and that was the desalination membrane lab where lobe and
Siri rajin developed the first commercially viable reverse osmosis membranes in the late 50s early 60s so I
got to work with some of the same people that were working on developing the first commercially viable membranes that
is fascinating it was such a joy to see how it all began and I got to work with
some of these same people that were way smarter than me figuring all these things out we’re going to talk a lot
about reverse osmosis but I’m curious what was the original problem that they were trying to solve what was their
hypothesis do you know any of that information yeah people needed water you
know especially in the Middle East where you have seawater and you can’t drink
you can’t make power out of it you can’t and you know you got increasing populations so what do you do you can
use evaporation but that is requires a lot of energy because it’s a phase
change you’re going from a liquid phase to a vapor phase and then you condense
The Vapor as your good water so they were looking how to make fresh clean
water in a less energy intensive way and so they
looked at reverse osmosis and you know came up with these cellulose acetate membranes CA membranes
that did the job pretty well that is interesting I had no idea
that your experience went back to the origins of Aro this is going to be an
amazing interview great yeah it did yeah well let’s start there if somebody is just
tuning in today and maybe they’ve heard of Ro or reverse osmosis but they really
don’t know what it is what’s a basic definition of reverse osmosis okay it is
a separation process where you remove dissolved ions and solids like sodium
and chloride and calcium and things like that that are dissolved in water from the water so you have one influence
stream coming in and then you have a product water stream that’s very very low in minerals and you
have a high concentration stream that’s low volume but very high concentration
of dissolved solids and it’s a pressure-driven process so you use pressure to force the water through the
membrane and the membrane retains the minerals and dissolved solids so that’s
that’s a real simple in a nutshell how it works so in in normal osmosis nature
likes an equilibrium so normal osmosis is from low to high but we’re reversing
the osmosis and that’s why we need pressure correct correct because each
solution with minerals in it has a pressure and it depends on the concentration of the dissolved solids
they exert what we call osmotic pressure and in in natural flow of things water
will move from the low concentration compartment into the high concentration
where there’s higher pressure in order to dilute that stream and so then you get equilibrium where you have the same
concentration on both sides to get reverse osmosis to work you have to
apply a pressure greater than the osmotic pressure of the solution to force the water to move in the reverse
Direction and that’s where the pressure comes in you’re absolutely right why would somebody body choose Ro over a
different type of filtration oh boy well reverse osmosis
pretty compact the membranes are easy to make it doesn’t require a lot of
chemicals like for ION exchange you need acid and costic and neutralization and you need to store all that stuff so you
have all that stuff and then neutralize the waste and the other competitor as I mentioned a little bit earlier is
evaporation and that is large scale type systems where there’s a phase change so
it’s it’s pretty energy intensive and with some of the developments in membranes going to lower pressure
operations and and better membrane selectivity and things like that we’ve
gotten to the point where you can use reverse osmosis even in Middle East
where there’s those big desalination plants that reverse osmosis is outpacing
evaporation now for the number one one desalination mechanism my passion is water so I work
in water and I also scuba dive so that’s my hobby and one of my favorite places to scuba dive is Bonair and that’s in
the Dutch Caribbean and all of their water for the island is reverse osmosis
and there’s actually a big pipe that we scuba dive over and we can see all of
their discharge water and you can see that it’s highly concentrated and it
it’s going back into salt water and you can see that it’s more concentrated than the surrounding water so uh explain that
we get a very high concentration coming off for every so much of the water that
we desire right and that percentage varies on the pressure you can apply and
the concentration and the osmotic pressure but you’re right you have one clean stream and one highly concentrated
stream and you can recover anywhere for seawater it’s like 40 to 50 50% of the
water you send in comes out as fresh water but with sustainability and trying to increase
you know Recycling and reclaiming water we’re getting up to 85 90
95% recovery on reverse osmosis type systems now you touched upon seeing that
high concentration solution coming back out into the ocean that’s one of the
knocks against reverse osmosis is where do you put the concentrate and
we do have a session I’m I’m bringing up IWC right now International Water conference we do have a session on brine
management where we talk about what to do with the brine that comes off of
these desalination and evaporation and reverse osmosis type systems so it’s
there’s a number of things you can do with it and it’s site specific but that is a concern with reverse osmosis well I
can tell you from firsthand EXP experience and scuba diving over that uh
discharge the coral looks very different where that discharge is yeah they have
to adjust a good example when I said 50% recovery that means assuming all of the
minerals are rejected by the membrane you are now concentrating those minerals by a factor of two so if you had 100
milligrams per liter coming in you will have 200 in your concentrate stream if
you go to 90 % recovery you have 10 times the concentration 95 you’re at 40
times concentration so you get to those High concentration Solutions and you
have to really figure out what to do with it we’re talking about very large systems but of course you can also get
systems that go underneath your kitchen sink how do you size these systems oh boy well sizing of the
reverse osmosis system really depends on how much you want to use and what kind of recovery you can get so you know for
example I’m working on several projects right now where they’re like in the 600
GPM range th000 GPM range and a lot of
things have to do with designing for feed water guidelines and avoiding
fouling and scaling which does happen with the membranes when you design it
you design for a recovery and fluxes with which is the water per square foot
per day of membrane so we designed for avoiding fouling and scaling and that’s
really how we size the system so if you are too aggressive and you make a
smaller system for you know your 600 GPM you’re going to foul and scale faster
than if you do a conservative design and come up with a larger more membrane and
a a better construction of how you arrange those membranes in the system so
that’s something that the designer really has to take into account when they’re when they’re sizing their RO
system we mentioned the small under the sync version and we have something like that in our lab uh we we have our water
which is actually pretty good considering but we put it through an RO and then we polish it with uh with some
di resin with the ion exchange right and we get some great water that we don’t have to worry about any any residuals as
we’re doing testing and different dilutions but I tell you I love teaching new reps reverse osmosis by saying let’s
look under the sink and talk about what’s going on so there’s a lot to be learned from those small scale models
absolutely and the large systems work exactly the same way as the small systems were speaking of scaling up
scaling up from the sync system to a large system has different issues but
basically the membranes are the same you’re dealing with the same in one stream in and a waist stream and a good
stream coming out so basically just the same there are different types of
membranes on the market can you speak to that yes uh originally we talked about the cellulose acetate which is one kind
of polymer those are still used but more in Niche type applications the advantage
of those membranes is they can tolerate free chlorine so you can send it up to
about 1 PPM 1 milligram per liter of free chlorine on a continuous basis and
avoid or minimize we should say biofin polyamid membranes or PA sometimes
referred to as thin film composits or TFC are made out of polyamid material
and it’s it’s actually a composite of polyamid on top of polyone so you have two different
membranes and that’s why it’s called a thin film composite because it’s a composite of two different materials
those membranes come in a huge variety of types you have seawater you’ve got
brackish water you got high rejection you got low energy you got sanitary you
got high temperature all of them have a little bit different characteristics to
them and depending on what your application is you need to pick the the correct one for your
application so yeah so there’s a lot of them out there you wrote a great white
paper on the fouling of those types of membranes I’m going to make sure we have
that on our show notes page if that’s all right with you yeah absolutely yeah membrane biofouling and and how to avoid
it and techniques and things like that yeah it’s it’s a it’s a long paper but it covers everything you ever wanted to
know or didn’t want to know about membrane bof filing so thanks for bringing that up well speaking of that
let’s talk about some of the things that can go wrong with reverse osmosis so everything’s installed it’s working fine
until it’s not what are some of the things that we need to be monitoring and then what do we need to know in order to
get it to where it needs to be if it’s not working properly right the key to
that starts with the design of the membrane system so you need to design
get the what we call the array which is how you arrange the membranes in the RO
system with your syn system you have one membrane with a 600 GPM system you have
150 200 membranes and how you arrange them makes a big difference because if
you don’t arrange them properly you enhance fing and scaling so that’s the
first thing the second thing is proper monitoring and pre-treatment so kind of
two things so if you have a lot of iron and manganes Fant coming in they need to
be addressed before they get to the RO membrane if you have scale coming in
those that needs to be addressed before you get to the RO membrane and scale
really is a concentration phenomenon so the higher your recovery the more likely
you are to scale so you really have to think about that as you’re designing for your 75 80 85 90% recovery systems and
then the monitoring the last piece is making sure that you monitor the health of your membranes and you start
proactively cleaning the membranes when your data tells you it’s time to clean
that’s difficult for some Industries especially food and beverage that’re always trying to make water and more
water and they run out of time to be able to clean and then it just fance
become irreversibly attached to the membrane so if you wait too long to clean you’ll never recover full perform
performance and it’s kind of goes into a downward spiral then so really the
design the pre-treatment and the monitoring are absolutely the keys to
making sure your system is going to keep working well could you describe the high points of the cleaning process cleaning
interesting yes so we have cleaning you have a high pH cleaning and a low PH
cleaning the high pH involves detergents and Eda and some other chemistries and
the idea is to take out Organics and Belling and as you know biofouling
really requires sanitation where you kill everything you cannot sanitize polyamid membranes because they dissolve
in the oxidant so that’s actually what my thesis research was on is how
membranes dissolve in chlorine so yeah so you can’t really
sanitize but you can disinfect um and it’s it’s sort of okay um you can
recover some performance especially if you clean on time so you’ve got that and you do that first because the
extracellular polymers that surround bio that make the Slime that you see and
feel that basically can set or gel if you do a low PH cleaning first so unless
you’re absolutely positive you have no bio fing you want to do your high pH cleaning first and then you follow with
a low PH cleaner some acid citric acid or something like that to remove iron
and aluminum and calcium carbonate scales calcium fluoride things like that
so it’s this two-step process where people get hung up is in
sizing of the cleaning pump it’s too small in most cases you you need good
cross flow velocity because not only is you’re cleaning chemical but also hydraulic so you need that good
hydraulic cross flow velocity to remove things that you’ve deposited on the membrane that you’ve now lifted off with
the chemistry and the other thing is people don’t allow enough time it takes
time to clean so a two-stage system with a high and a low PH cleaning would take
about 12 hours to clean and people try and get that done in three or four and you’re not going to get a clean and then
you’re going to clean earlier the next time and the next time and again we get back into our downward spiral that is
the issue customers always want to know how quickly can you do this and uh it’s
like an episode of Star Trek well I need it done in 12 hours we don’t have 12 hours you only have three hours or whatever they said on that show so so
it’s not done right we don’t we now don’t get the uh longevity in between cleanings and the customer wants to know
uh how long they can go until they can schedule another cleaning so if we’re
all working well together we are putting the right amount of time in we’re giving
12 hours and then when we get our customers to schedule the next cleaning what’s a way to determine that okay what
we have when we monitor is we call normalization of data and what normalization of data does is kind of
convert every day your your daytoday data to what you had when you had brand
new membranes so there are six things that affect membrane performance fing scaling
membrane degradation temperature pressure and concentration and those
change from hour to hour dayto day month to month but when you had brand new
membranes you take data let’s say 24 hours after starting up and that becomes your Baseline temperature pressure and
concentration and then what normalization does it’s some equations you can get them from the from the
American testing ASM American Society of testing or I I forget what the uh ASM
stands for we can maybe look that up or put it in your your glossery at the end there but ASM has some equations that
you plug into and then you look at the curve that results and look at your
normalized data and if your normalized data shows that you are de inreasing or
increasing by a certain percent it becomes time then to schedule your
cleaning and a lot of people don’t follow that they don’t follow their
normalized data I I come into customers all the time and I ask them where’s your normalized data and I get this blank
look I know I know okay so now we don’t know when to clean and you clean when your pump reaches the maximum pressure
and you can’t make any more water and that’s usually the case that is usually the case and then it becomes an
emergency instead of a planned event exactly and then you wind up replacing
membranes because you’ve you’ve exceeded the maximums on the membrane you start breaking the membranes apart we call
that telescoping when your differential pressure is too high and it just kind of unrolls you know like when you have
Christmas wrapping paper and you’re trying to roll it back up and the end always undoes yeah that’s telescoping
your membrane can do that as well if it’s supplied with too much differential pressure that’s a fantastic analogy I
remember being at a conference it might have been the IWC but it was on reverse
osmosis and the prediction was that every cooling tower was going to have
some sort of reverse osmosis and put it into the boiler do you remember that there was a bunch of information about
that it never really happened yeah it’s because it’s a lot more difficult than it sounds it requires again we get to
the pre-treatment cool cooling tower blowdown is dirty it’s very dirty water
High concentration of dissolved solids and it has a lot of suspended solids in it from the atmosphere everything that
gets into the tower so it’s not as easy as just sticking an RO on the end and sending that water back to the boiler a
lot of people have looked at making some standardized type systems to treat
cooling tower blowdown but there’s nothing out there yet where you can say oh I want one of those packages I’m
going to put that online and and our company is working on on trying to develop some of those packages but to
date it’s it’s so site specific an individual that trying to put a standard
package together is extremely difficult for that I want to say that was about 20 years ago and the warning was every
industrial water treater better get ready for this because it’s going to change the entire industry and uh we
just haven’t seen it yet no no we haven’t there’s a lot of things that really haven’t come to fruition and I
think that’s one of the things that people have learned about reverse osmosis over the years is it’s not a
black box that you can put everywhere you need to understand what your pre-treatment requirements are what
water you’re sending to it the rrow doesn’t care if it’s getting City water
or waste water it has to have the same quality of water going to it otherwise it’s going to foul in scale so it’s not
just drop in and let it go and do its thing those are the customers that have the biggest problems is where they just
drop it in didn’t do any pre-treatment and then expect it to work like it was
working on City water well let’s stay on that topic for a while because there are a lot of industries that are using
reverse osmosis for Recovery water where are you seeing that very successfully
used good question not very many people
are doing it successfully for recovering water for back into their into their
plants and the reason why is is expensive and water in this country is
still cheap and I just gave a presentation to AIC on this and the
bottom line is until people realize the value of water you know
companies say they want to be sustainable and green and all that stuff but then when they come back and they look at the cost for all the
pre-treatment you know usually need clarifiers sometimes biological treatment clarifiers ultra filtration Ro
maybe even some polishing of the RO water it gets to be very expensive and
unless they have no way of getting more fresh water in the front end of the plant there’s no payback or the payback
is six or seven years and customers can’t handle that at this point so until
we get to the point where water is more valued and has a higher value on it it
um then then I think we will see more of it more successful application of it I
totally agree that the fact that water is easy to come by and it’s relatively cheap here in the states um I
interviewed somebody over in Israel and she said if you want to look for
emerging water Technologies look what they’re doing over there because they don’t have water and it is not cheap yes
yes and at IW see this year we do have two or three presenters from some of the
comp companies in Israel presenting some of their ideas on how to achieve higher
recovery even because that’s important because they can’t afford to waste 25 or
15% of the water coming into the rro they need to use as much as they can so
we we do have people from Israel coming to our International Water conference talking on those very same topics
absolutely what would you considered Advanced or the next generation of reverse
osmosis well there’s a number of problems that need to be overcome and one of those is the chlorine tolerance
so we need membranes that are chlorine tolerant or oxidant tolerant so we can
sterilize and not just disinfect the membranes because boping is a big problem and it’s difficult to control
and when we’re talking about food and beverage if you have any leak in your membranes or interconnectors or
anything like that the bio on the feed side of the membrane gets into your product so you have to be very very
careful so if we could do that that would be great I think as we go to more sustainable and need to recover more
waste water for recycle and reclaim and reuse we need to be able to operate at
higher concentrations and that’s where our Ultra ultra high pressure reverse
osmosis membranes come come into play those go up to um 1,800 PSI pounds per
square inch and those membranes they have some issues with them I’m working
with Dr Hook at at UCLA um with some of his graduate students that put out a great paper on
how these membranes the polyamid membranes get embossed by the permeate carriers used to create the membrane
spiral wound element and it’s putting holes in the membrane at those High pressures so we need to come up with
either new types of elements that aren’t spiral wound or that don’t have the permeate spacers that you know emboss
onto the membranes or maybe we need a whole new class of membranes to handle
these high pressure high recovery recycle systems so it’s all very interesting a lot of good stuff going on
in in Academia and R&D I used to do a segment on the show called the boiling point and it was when
I saw stuff out in the field and I would just think guys what are you thinking you can’t do this um but people told me
I sounded grumpy so I don’t call it the boiling point anymore but I want to give you the opportunity you’re you go out on
site you troubleshoot what’s something you just want people to stop doing oh boy yeah I
don’t even know where to start because I remember this one plant I went to and
that was just a disaster and every time they came to a decision point on what to
do with their system they went the wrong way and so they had five or six
different decision points like what do I do with my iron on my pre-treatment what do I do with this what do I do with that
and like for example I’m working I’m troubleshooting one right now where they’re fouling the membranes with bio
like crazy and so their their pressure goes up and they can’t maintain product
flow so they turn down how much water they make well the system is designed
for I don’t know 100 GPM or something you cannot turn it down to 60 GPM
because when you do that it ruins the hydraulics in your system and you start
fouling and scaling the membranes even faster so I think boiling it all down is
if you don’t know what to do ask for help ask for help there it is you know
don’t try and figure it out on your own there’s people that do this for a living that understand can help you so don’t
try and do it alone because you you you may wind up going down the wrong path and then get yourself into real trouble
I don’t know if what I’m getting ready to say is like this with every industry but it is sure like this in the water
treatment industry I have never reached out to an expert like yourself and asked
a question and somebody said oh you don’t deserve that information or I’m not going to give it to you it’s like everybody freely gives information in
this industry absolutely you know when I first started going to IWC
1994 was my first year going to IWC and this is what I always say I was so
impressed with the knowledge of all the people presenting and stuff and I’m thinking to myself I don’t deserve to be
here look at all these Geniuses and then everybody was so nice and helpful with
questions and problems and things like that that I I as as you say I don’t know
it’s like that in every industry but in the water treatment industry everybody’s willing to help you it’s like we’re all
on the same team we’re all on the same page trying to help each other and I I really like that about the IWC and the
water treatment industry in general is that everybody’s so willing to help nobody says that’s my secret I can’t
tell you that here let’s work on this problem and solve it together yeah very
good well let’s talk a little bit about the IW cuz you have a pretty large role
within that organization this year so why don’t we start out with what is the IWC and what are you specifically doing
within the IWC okay the International Water conference our IWC held every year it’s
a conference where we exchange ideas is really the way to put it ideas new ideas
how to solve problems that have been existing for a while we’ve got new ways of doing it and what I like about the
conference is it’s non-commercial the presentations are not
a sales for my latest widget you know so we have the infoshare Suites we have
this the uh H2O theater we have an exhibit hall and we have you know
informal networking where everybody can trade their latest widget but the presentations are about technology and
ideas so you can actually learn earn something and and I really like that and
the other thing that we have is we have a discussion paper where somebody actually reads the paper reads the
author’s paper and writes a critique and gets up and gives the critique and the
critique is like I didn’t understand this or why is that or can you expound a
something or to bring the audience into the Q&A to get them going to ask
questions of the author and so I think those two things the non-commercial ISM and the fact that we have a discussion
of the paper makes us unique and makes us interesting and a great place to
learn and it’s h you know for the younger professionals great place to
learn and for those of us who have been around the block for a while it’s a
great it’s a great place to share your ideas with some of the the newer people
and keep that going and we also have an emerging topics where we look for new ideas new processes new things coming up
in the industry that are worthwhile to discuss going forward so we develop new
sessions in following years so uh and and that’s anybody can contribute an
emerging topic you know anybody attending the conference anybody thinking about attending the conference
just submit your emerging topic something that’s of interest to you and we’ve got several that became sessions
like keos for example the per Florin alkal substances right and the high
recovery Ro is one the concentrate management is one that all started out
as emerging topics so it’s it’s a wonderful conference for anybody any
skill level you know a great place to go to learn you mentioned posos and I
remember one of the first times I heard about it it was in Orlando it was an IWC
conference and was Vaguely Familiar with it but it was one of those emerging topics now you can’t go to a water
conference without that being on the list well you cannot even watch television without some lawyer saying
were you exposed to posos Forever chemicals are you’re in trouble call us you’re right yeah scary
stuff and then getting back to your question what am I doing at IWC this year I’m the general chair for the
conference so actually the tough part was last year as the technical chair
because the technical chair which Bill Kennedy is our technical chair this year has to review all of the the approved
abstracts and put them in order and Define the sessions and get everybody all coordinated with that so that’s the
tough job and then as a reward the following year you get to be the general
chair so you get to introduce the conference and you know all the par participants and everybody you know
we’ve got a workshop chair and a marketing chair and a technical chair and a keynote chair which you are you’re
going to be our keynote which is excellent I’m really looking forward to that I’m so excited to do that yeah
that’s going to be wonderful so all those people get introduced and then I just have a good time who should come to
the International Water conference anybody who wants to learn about the latest and greatest in water
treatment not not only do we have membranes but we have boilers and Cooling and waste water and
pre-treatment and we have everything so I think anybody who wants to learn about the latest and greatest of what’s going
on in water treatment should be there and I know I’ve I’ve spoken to a number
of different groups in the last few months on you know some specific topics
and they get all excited when they hear about what we do at IWC with all of the different topics that we have and all
the experts and we have firsttime presenters too you know they are the they are the expert in their topic so it
doesn’t matter if they’ve presented 20 times or one time the author is the expert in their topic and that’s always
appreciated and acknowledged by the attendees of IWC so it’s really great if
you’re first timer or you’ve been there number of years it’s always great can you speak a bit on the exhibit hall the
exhibit hall is wonderful usually it’s around a hundred different exhibitors anything you want about water
treatment is there we’ve got membrane companies we’ve got clarifier companies
we’ve got instrument companies you know we’ve got just about anything you would
want and the beauty of it is you can then talk about their specific widgets
and people in the exhibit hall who are exhibiting can talk to you about their widgets and why their widgets are so
great so you don’t get totally just technology you also get the interaction
with vendors and I think that makes for a healthy conference because you get everything and the exhibit hall is
really it’s it’s great it’s great for networking there’s people I see once a year at IWC and I look forward to it and
have a little chat and see what they’re working on now so it’s it’s great for
networking if somebody wants to find out more about IWC what should they do
well we can go to the engineers Society of Western Pennsylvania
eswp which sponsors the International Water conference so you can go to their website or you can just look
International Water conference 2023 and go to the website and we have attendees
information we’ve got technical information we’ve got the workshops you know where you can take a 4-Hour
workshop and get totally immersed in that one topic Lindsay wilds and and myself at IWC we’re doing a workshop on
reverse osmosis so you can learn about it in 4 hours you know everything you always wanted to know about reverse
osmosis in four hours there you go so go to those websites you can also contact
me with my email address or Dave torski with the engineer Society of Western
Pennsylvania you can contact him and we’ll be happy to talk to you about it and share information and answer your
questions we will make sure to have all of that information on our show notes
page so people are driving right now we want to make sure they don’t take notes and wreck their cars exactly thank you
so much for that that’s great absolutely well I I’m not quite done with all of my
questions I’d like to transition to the lightning round so are you ready for those questions well as ready as I’ll be
all right let’s let’s go ahead these are questions that I ask of all of my guests uh so the first one if you could go back
in time and talk to your former self on your very first day as a chemical
engineer what advice would you give I would say be more proactive be
your best Advocate nobody’s going to do it for you it’s not going to happen so
you need to speak up for yourself be your best Advocate Jane and do the best
you can to try and move yourself forward what are some of your faite
references for reverse osmosis I like to read technical papers
our company subscribes to you know desalination and journal of membrane science and a couple other ones water
desalination report things like that I like reading the latest and the greatest
of what’s happening and trying to relate that to what I am doing and how I can
learn to do my job and my work better so I like reading I like reading about what
people are doing to advance the technology and I understand that you
have a book that is chock packed full of all sorts of resources can we talk about
that sure yeah thank you so much yeah the Third Edition of my reverse osmosis
book just came out in June titled reverse osmosis that’s a great Title by
the way I know I know well we didn’t want any ambiguity about what it’s about right so there we go but it
covers history what membranes are how they work pre-treatment fing scaling
degradation I have a I have a section on sustainability which is a new one that was added to the second edition which
came out in 2015 so added a a section on sustainability and new topics in in
membrane research and application and and things like that and the beauty of
it is it’s so full of references so that if it’s not clear the
way I’m saying it go to the reference and read it for yourself on what the
reference is saying and you know I’m I am not pretending that I know it all there are people out there references
out there who know way more than I do and I thought if I put it all together in one
place you you’ve got it and that will be a reference for you on reverse osmosis
and that was my whole point in writing it is I couldn’t find a book when I was stuck on something I couldn’t find a
reference that would answer my question so I said okay I’m going to write it and there it is it’s a fantastic resource it
should be on everybody’s shelf who is in the world of reverse osmosis and to make
it as easy as possible for people to find we’re also going to have a link on our show notes page directly to that
great thank you so much Trac and I hope people enjoy it and I’d like the feedback you know I don’t know if I’m
going to write a fourth edition but if I do please give me feedback on things that you liked what you wanted to learn
more about I’m all about improving as we move forward who do you want playing
Jane in the movie about your life who would I have play me I like
Kathleen Turner a lot of people may not know who Kathleen Turner is but she was
in one of my favorite movies body heat that came out in 1981 but was in those
Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile and War of the Roses and I think
she can play a wide range of characters and I think I’ve changed a lot in my
life and she could probably handle the depth and breadth of of Jane Cera I’ve got to say if somebody would
have asked me that question that’s exactly who I would have chosen for you in fact when when we had a our very
first conversation that’s who I thought of oh that’s great so how about that that I should have written that down and
and shown you my answer as as you were were saying it oh that’s great my last
question is if you had the ability to talk to anybody throughout history who would it be with and why oh this I like
this question I would want to speak to anyone of the original Mercury 7
astronauts I am such a space geek I remember growing up in grade school the
teachers would always wheel in the television into the room to watch the blast offs and the
splashdowns and I just got so caught up in it and you know maybe even Walter
kronite because he was such a big fan of the space program so any of the Mercury
7even astronauts their life must have been so I mean I just I had the chance I
was working on stuff for the space station with my first job out of school
and I had the chance to go to Johnson Space Center in Houston and go into the
shuttle that they used to train the shuttle astronauts and that was such a
thrill for me but I remember I was so claustrophobic my heart was just
pounding because I’m like there’s no way you could pay me enough to go up into
this thing for a week because it’s so tiny and yeah so I got to sit in the the
captain’s chair and the whole ceiling is covered with switch and knobs and buttons and I’m 5’6 and I could barely
stand up but I just am so fascinated with with space so it would be one of
the Mercury Seven astronauts Jane this has been fantastic thank you so much for
sharing the knowledge of your career and coming on the scaling up H2O podcast
well thank you trace I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and share some of the things that make Jen
Cera Jen Cera [Music] once again thank you Jane what a fun
interview and I have to say I’ve been to the International Water conference
before I’ve never attended it at the level or at the role where I did just
recently but because of that I got to meet pretty much everybody on their executive staff what a great bunch of
people and Nation I’m telling you make sure you’re looking at all the different
conferences that are out there and don’t just attend make sure that you are
meeting new people and here is a secret that is no secret but people treat it
like it’s a secret because I don’t think everybody does it is volunteer all these
organizations cannot do what they do unless you volunteer and help get that
valuable work done all of these trade rated organizations are run on
volunteers and that means you now that means that you are going to give and we
talked about giving earlier in this show but if you give with that Full Cup
mentality others are going to see you as a giver and I promise it is my 100%
money back guarantee that you will get more out of volunteering when you
volunteer with that full cut mentality than if you just go to a show if you
just ask people to give you items when you show up with that Full Cup mentality
people see that and they want to help you they want to fill your cup and a
great way to get to know people in your community and enhance your community
while you are doing it is to get to know your your favorite trade related organization like the International
Water conference getting involved with them and volunteering with that Full Cup
mentality now if you want to see any of the associations that we work with here
at scaling up H2O of course we’ve got that on our web page I’ve said it a
dozen times but why not one more that’s scaling up h2o.com and we have so many
resources for you there and it really is my wish that you get involved I promise
you will not be sorry that you did now somebody I met because I got involved
and he got involved is our friend James McDonald and here is a brand new
periodic water table with James hello and welcome to the periodic water table
with James where we think and learn about water chemistry drop by drop please use your week to search online
ask your colleagues or even pick up a book to learn more about each week’s periodic water table topic if you do at
the end of the year you’ll be 52 water chemistry smarter so let’s raise the water table of knowledge together and
get started today’s topic is amp or am or atmp or aminot
trimethylene phosphonic acidd its chemical formula is C3 h12 N9
P3 it is a phosphinate what is amp used for is it synergistic with other
ingredients to improve its corrosion inhibitor abilities what is the impact of oxidizing bi biocides upon amp how
does amp compare to other phosphinates what is its calcium tolerance when would
one choose to use amp can it help control calcium sulfate precipitation
remember knowledge is power and taking the time to learn more about water chemistry each week will help make you a
force to be reckoned with be sure to post what you learned to social media and tag it with #w t23 and # scaling up
H2O I look forward to learning more from you James as always thank you for
helping us learn a little bit more each and every week and thank you to all the
scaling up Nation members thank you for listening and thank you for tuning in to
the new episode that we will have for you next Friday have a great week
[Music] folks scale up Nation you asked for it
and it is here so many of you are taking the certified water technologist
examination and you’re wanting to get better information on how to better
better answer the mock exam now this is the exam that you get when you sign up
for the cwt exam well I have heard your
request and I’ve done exactly that I have recorded a class that has exactly
what you’ve been asking for it is me answering each one of the questions and
letting you know why I chose certain answers and of course everybody wants me
to do math and I do all the math on the mock exam so you can see how to get the
right answer and I hope this is something that will help build your confidence so you can get your
certification you can go to scaling up2.com cwt prep once again that’s scaling
up2.com cwt prep get out there and get your
certification today