The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.
[Music]
today’s episode is proudly sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind the term
Mastermind was originally written in Napoleon Hills book Think and Grow Rich
before that the earliest documentation that we have of a mastermind group was
Ben Franklin’s group that he used to meet every single week in a Tavern that he called huness Nation there’s no doubt
about it life is too short to do it alone and it’s not very much fun to do
it alone in nation I urge you to go to scaling up h2o.com and find out if the
rising tide Mastermind is right for you I’d love to have a 15minute call with
you to explain all things Rising tide Mastermind and see if this is a group
that’s right for you and you are right for the group go to scaling up h2o.com
slm
Mastermind welcome to the scaling up H2O podcast the podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our
systems my name is Trace Blackmore the host of this awesome podcast and I want to thank you for listening today so many
listeners are listening on a regular basis to not only build up their knowledge on Industrial water treatment
but to feel as they are part of a community and that Community is the
scaling up nation and folks I have to say when I started this podcast over
seven years ago I hoped that a few people would listen to it what I never
imagined was the community that would come from the listeners of this podcast
and scaling up Nation I am just so amazed every time I go to an event and I
see so many people wearing their scaling up H2O buttons to symbolize that they
listen to this podcast and I see them meet with other people wearing scaling
up H2O buttons and they’ll walk down exhibit Halls together they’ll go to
technical papers together and I just think that that is so amazing because
that’s really what this industry is all about anybody can do water treatment but
why would you do it alone when you are able to do it with comrades with friends
with people that you trust with people that can help you with issues that you
are experiencing well all that’s nice to say but how do you start that
conversation and it’s so cool when I go to these conferences and and if you’re
wondering where you get a scaling up H2O button if you see me or anyone of our
great team members at a water conference we are always giving out buttons and
then people will wear those buttons to Future conferences so they can be
identified as scaling up Nation members and like I said people will seek each
other out and say hey I listen to that podcast too what technical paper are you
getting ready to go to or what training are you enrolled in and that starts a
conversation and ultimately a brand new friendship that has just been beyond my
wildest dreams when I started this podcast so for all of you that are doing
that and making the scaling up Nation what it is I want to commend you and I
want to urge you to keep that up because that brings a level
of what we do in our industry it it brings it to a higher level where one
we’re not doing it alone two we’re able to talk with other people about our
daytoday without having to tell people what it is that our day today is and
we’re able to have more fun we’re able to solve problems we’re able to process
issues so all of that to say I just am so humbled that we have have the scaling
up Nation so scaling up Nation here is to you thank you for not only listening to this podcast but creating a community
and being part of something that carries out our mission which is to raise the bar in the industrial water treatment
industry one water treater at a time and I am so happy to say that we have tens
of thousands of members of the scaling up Nation you know when I go to those
conferences a lot of people will tell me that they didn’t even know that the conference we were at was coming up
unless they listened to this podcast and this is something we started a couple
years ago there’s just so much information out there and you are so
busy driving from account to account servicing accounts talking to customers doing all the things that you have to do
in your job how can you possibly keep up with all the conferences with all the
different trainings that are coming up so you can schedule it in your calendar
well that’s where the great team of scaling up H2O came up with our events
page and that’s scaling up h2o.com events or you can go directly to
navigating in the top menu and going over to events but it has everything
that we know of that pertains to our industry so you can simply click and
plan the entire year in fact we’ve got more than an entire year up there a lot
of people plan their conferences for years in advance and that’s up on our calendar so here are a few things that
you might want to attend March 4th through 7th the membrane technology
conference is taking place in West Palm Beach Florida so this is all about new
ctions in water and wastewater Technologies dealing with membranes this
is hosted by the American Water Works Association and if you want more information about this it of course will
be on our event section of our website Nation this next one is something that I
look forward to each and every year because I am personally involved and what am I talking about I’m talking
about the association of water technology Technical Training seminars and of course we do that twice a year
and all the courses that are available we have an RO training we have a sales
training we have a fundamentals and applications training we have a Technical Training we have a Wastewater
training and there’s even an asse 12,080 training so there is something
for everybody and you’ve got two opportunities to take these and maybe
you take one of the courses on one and then you you take another one on the
following one so what are those dates well the first date is March 6th through 9th that’s going to be in Frisco Texas
and then we have another one April 17th through 20th in Cleveland Ohio so go to
our events page and we’re going to have all that information for you we’re going to make it very easy for you to figure
out which course you want to sign up for and Folks by all means if you attend one
one or both of these please make sure you come up and find me I love meeting
members of the scalin up nation and I’ll even give you one of those buttons that we were talking about in the very
beginning of this show well what else is going on we’ve got the water loss conference in San Sebastian Spain so if
you are over there you want to check that out April 14th through 17th and
that is hosted by the International Water Association we’re going to have all the information about that
conference on our events page and then finally this is a big conference this is
the American boiler manufacturers Association boiler technology conference
and Expo taking place in Denver Colorado May 1st and 2nd this is all things
boilers and this is an amazing show if you have never been so if you want to check that out we will have that and
everything I mentioned and even things I did not not mention on our events page
you can go there by scaling up h2o.com and navigating over to the events page
Nation as always we are looking to learn on this podcast and our friend James
McDonald helps us each and every week with that so here’s a brand new drop by drop with
[Music] James welcome to drop by drop with James
the podcast segment where we wonder explore think about imagine and learn
industrial water treatment you guessed it drop by drop
together in today’s episode I have a useful little quote from the 2021
edition of the consensus on operating practices for the control of feed water and boiler water chemistry in industrial
and institutional boilers catchy Title by the American Society of mechanical
engineers orm it says where a choice is available the
reduction or removal of objectionable constituents by pre-treatment external to the boiler is always preferable to
and more reliable than management of these constituents within the boiler by internal chemical treatment which
involves boiler blowdown and chemical feed to the boiler system chew on that for a
minute where a choice is available the reduction or removal of objectionable
constituents by pre-treatment external to the boiler is always preferable to
and more reliable than management of these constituents within the boiler by internal chemical
treatment as vital and important as internal chemical treatment is to a boiler consider all the ways it could
fail would you rather manage hardness in your boiler with internal chemical treatment or by using pre-treatment such
as a water softener think about the benefits of other pre-treatment as well
I’ve always considered this one particular line Within These guidelines to be a very powerful sentence I’ve used
it to help justify my pretreatment recommendations as third-party support for softeners reverse osmosis
Etc I’m James McDonald and I want to encourage you to be like water by forming bonds with those around you
dissolving new knowledge and making worthy ripples drop by
drop well thank you James Nation we mentioned the membrane technology
conference taking place March 4th through 7th in West Palm Beach Florida
well what a good opportunity to invite a guest to talk about membrane technology
here’s that interview my lab partner today is Chris
Rover of zwitterco Welcome Chris glad to be here well we are happy to have you on
the scaling up H2O podcast and I would love it if you would introduce yourself
to the scaling up Nation sure so uh as you said my my name is Chris Rover um
I’m one of the co-founders and currently the CTO uh of zwitterco I came out of
forward osmosis before Z Coast I’ve been around the the water and water technology industry for about 10 or 11
years now and so mainly a focus on on membranes and membrane technology but I’ve touched a lot of different pieces
of that so you know I think that’s that’s kind of a little bit of my journey how I I came into it but uh we
started zwitterco in in 2018 and uh you know it’s been a journey ever since what
does your day today look like so today you know I I’m very heavily involved
with our with our R&D teams right so we’re working on a lot of new membrane technology and then I spent quite a bit
of time on the business strategy just as as part of the founding team and the leadership team and thinking about the
markets that you know we see as attractive and where we think our technology can can help make a
difference and I do spend some time especially on those Emerging Market ideas where we’re not really sure how
the technolog is going to fit super well or maybe it needs to be adapted and used in a different way because there’s a lot
of different ways that people are are tackling these Water Challenges so as a
membrane technology provider we Supply the membranes but we get pretty involved
especially in those kind of early exploration of of how the membranes are going to be used supporting our
customers supporting our partners and thinking through the different ways that they might use it you know so an example
might be in some cases you know you might drop a membrane into an existing process to maybe improve the alen or
pre-concentrate the input in other cases you’re you’re taking out you know maybe what was done before and replacing it
entirely with a membrane system so I spend quite a bit of time on the target applications where we’re trying to
understand what attributes of our technology can help with that uh problem we’re
trying to solve because it takes a lot of deep understanding of exactly what makes it tick to think of different ways
you might use it well let’s start our conversation with talking about Wastewater so if someone were to call
you and they said that they wanted to deplo some of the technologies that you
have in their Wastewater operation what are some of the questions that you’re going to be asking from them and how
would you decide that you do have something that would improve their operation yeah that’s a great question
so in almost every case you know the the first thing we’re trying to understand is how do you deal with this today you
know what are you doing today and so we’ve seen everything from they’ve got a treatment system maybe maybe it’s a
different kind of a membrane or maybe they’re using a biological system we’ve seen we discharge it we’ve seen we haul
it away you know because we can’t treat it and we don’t know what else to do with it so we always try to ground
ourselves you know especially when it’s a when it’s a plant that already exists with what’s happening right now usually
after that we try to understand what what’s their end goal you know it might be that they need more they want to
reuse some of that water for expansion or they’re really struggling meeting their permit requirements or just the
costs are too high whatever they’re doing right now is too expensive and then finally we we try to understand you know have you tried anything else you
know and so what some of the things we look for is you know maybe someone tried
uh a memory technology before and they had a lot of problems with fowling or cleaning or you know they tried another
technology and the water quality just wasn’t quite there and they couldn’t you know reach the levels they wanted so there are some of the clues that we look
for that says hey this this might be the right answer for them you know usually if the answers to those questions are we
have a conventional water treatment system it runs well we meet our effluent goals and the cost are in check you know
it’s less likely that we have a really compelling solution for them what are
some of the traditional issues that you run into when you’re using membranes so
for a long time you know membranes have have been expanding in the market very quickly right so there’s just been
membrane growth has has been outstripping uh a lot of other technology for many years because it it
offers a lot of really nice advantages um when you’re treating Water and Wastewater when as people have pushed
membranes into you know let’s call it unconventional applications where you’re
taking maybe untreated ethin from a fact Factory or you know you’re trying to you
know treat something that looks a lot more like Industrial Waste than say municipal waste you run into this
problem of of fowling and so what you know what fowling is is you know anybody that’s sort of used a filter has gone
through that experience of like the pressure on the filters going up the flow is going down and it’s a little bit
different for a membrane because they’re run in what’s called a tangential flow mode and so you have already some of the
fluid is going through the membrane and some is is passing out as concentrate but it’s sort of the same idea all these
organic molecules all these oils and proteins and and the stuff that you’re removing from the water impacts on the
surface and increases the pressure reduces the flow and so we really think about that as two different phenomena
that are going on and one of them is is kind of you can deal with it operationally and that’s the formation
of this kind of film on the surface and you go through different ways of cleaning that off and some technologies
use back flushing and and some use chemical cleaning but what a lot of people have experienced in these wastewaters is is an irreversible loss
of performance and that’s usually attributed to all these you know fine organic molecules and oils accumulating
within the little microscopic holes in the membrane and getting lodged in there and they’re very hard to displace once
they’re once they’re embedded so that’s been one of the sort of Achilles seals if you will of putting membranes into
more and more heavily contaminated Wastewater is keeping them performing for long enough to recoup the investment
and that’s where we think our technology you know is is really a step change and makes a big difference and that’s what it’s that’s what our Market focus is is
unconventional Waters that have a lot of challenges with with fouling of membranes well let’s talk about your
company name and what exactly a zwitter ion is yeah that’s a great question so
exactly we’re named after zwitter ions um and so zwitter ions came out of some
research in Germany right um you know earlier on in chemistry and chemists started to identify types of molecules
that seemed you know they were very confusing at first and this is kind of before the era of our modern chemical
instruments but you know they they exhibited all the the chemical behaviors
you’d expect from assault so they seem to react to Electric Fields their ionized they really seem like they’re
they’re an ion but they know because they synthesized it that they are in fact organic molecules and they
furthermore showed evidence of having both positive and negative charges and so so what awit iion is is exactly that
it’s an organic molecule that has a a part of the the molecule you know a
specific um you know cluster of atoms a functional group that’s uh fully ionized
and is a cation a positive ion and then another part of it uh that’s that’s anionic and that’s a full negative ion
and so there are natural examples of this some of the amino acids fall in this category some of them are permanently zwitterionic which means
they exhibit that zwitter iion trait across the whole PH range and some of them only show this property in certain
pH ranges so what’s really interesting about this chemistry is it it’s kind of
this almost like you know the VIN diagram of on one hand you have inorganic salts and they’re electrolytes
and they you know we can sort of we know what to expect they increase the conductivity of water they react to
Electric Fields they’re very hydrophilic and then you have organic molecules that are traditionally you know more hydrophobic
you know and don’t react to all these phenomena and with are right in the middle and so you have these uh organic
molecules and we can do things like polymerize them and we can use a lot of the synthetic chemistry techniques to
manipulate them into materials but they are also permanently ionized and that
means they’re incredibly hydrophilic and so that means you know water is really attracted to those ion groups and very
strongly solvates them and this means that when you make materials out of Zer ions they tend to really attract water
molecules you know really at the molecular level and the sort of the corollary to that is that oil and other
inorganics actually have or I’m sorry other Organics have a really hard time sticking to them and absorbing to them
because they’re just soaking up water so quickly and so we name the company after
this because our you know all of our core IP derives from how to how to build membranes out of Zer ions and there’s a
lot there’s a lot that goes into it it’s actually it sounds great like oh we’re going to make this membrane out of this really hydrophilic material and people
people tried it you know I mean even you know 10 15 years ago you know the problem with really hydrophilic
materials is they dissolve in water so you have to get a little bit uh sharper
on your Chemistry approach to actually uh make a durable surface out of something that that is that strongly
solvated by water so you obviously found a way to combine the zwitter ion
technology with the membrane what does that do to the membrane yeah and I and I don’t want to take to too much of the
credit that so you know we have a a strong relationship with with tough University which some research groups
there did a lot of the early foundational work on this and develop the core IP and so um you know myself
and the other co-founders all have connections to toughs and we licens that IP to to form the company but I don’t
want to certainly deny credit to the very talented researchers that that did the foundational work on this what this
does for membranes is by building these membranes out of zonic materials we can
give them this really hydrophilic property that makes them virtually immune to that second fowling we talked
about earlier which is that idea of that permanent absorption of oil and Organics into the the pores of a membrane one of
the analogies I like to use to help people kind of visualize this you know people think of a membrane almost like a pasta strainer you know like this plane
with holes in it and that’s actually the wrong way to picture it uh a membrane looks a lot more like a kitchen sponge
right so it’s got 3D structure and it’s like a you know a lot of pores in it as you move through the material and I
think if anybody has ever dipped a sponge in you know grease and then tried to get all the grease out of the sponge
you’ve got a really good idea of what’s happening at the at the microscopic level when you have membrane fing so our
membranes are built a bit differently they use the Witter ionic chemistry and the switter ions are just really really
resistant to absorbing any of that oil or grease material and that allows them to be really easily cleaned even under
you know really harsh upset conditions where you know normally you’d be you’d be thinking about buying new membranes at that point in a typical Ro you look
for a change in pressure across the membrane in order to know when you’re going to clean it is that the same thing
that you’re doing with these membranes how do you know when there need to be cleaned and then a follow-up question is
what do you clean them with yeah no that’s that’s a great question so so that was kind of our first thought you
know when we first started trying to see what the technology could do we certainly started from what had been done before through a lot of our early
testing with our customers we realized a couple things the first was that those usual cut offs of you know hey you’re
gonna once your pressure increases 10% or so you’re going to clean we can actually be a lot more flexible because
we’re not worried about you know usually with a conventional Ro or conventional membrane there’s a fear that if you let
that build up too far you’re not going to be able to reverse it and we just don’t have that problem we’ve we’ve
experimented with letting the the pressures go up by a factor of 10 before we clean you know sort of simulating a a
really bad upset and you could still clean them back to to uh their starting performance what we clean with I mean
obviously it varies a little bit uh industry to industry but one of the themes is it’s generally much more mild
and much cheaper to pull off so a really common cleaning regimen for us would be a 50 part per million bleach solution
that we raise the ph up to you know 11 or so and you can clean without an ambient temperature you just kind of
recirculated over the membranes 30 minutes and you should be back to your starting performance in cases where you
have specialty contaminants like there’s a lot of iron in the water and you you you might end up with some cetric acid
or something um so you can use a lot of the usual you know knowledge that’s been accumulated in the industry about how to
clean membranes but we also have cases where customers water flush their membranes every day and they haven’t
cleaned in months so you know it I’ll give the usual water industry answer of
it’s depends it depends I’m familiar with that yeah and and part of it reflects you know we’ve treated an
enormous variety you know we got a a project we’re working on right now that looks a lot you know it’s a 20 PPM cood
10 PPM TSS and that’s a really high flu application where we’re we’re just water rinsing to clean and on the other end
we’ve we’ve treated fluids that you know the concentrate is approaching 10% oil and grease and so that’s a different
ballpark for your cleaning regimen so typically in a normal membrane situation
we’re looking out for fat soils and greases biological contamination maybe High chlorine coming in from the city
water how does your technology change how we look at those things yeah so you
know it’s important to think about what our technology removes and what it doesn’t right so it’s not an RO technology at least not our first
product the super filtration that we have out on the market what it excels at is removing oil and grease you know
organic biopolymers algae viruses bacteria so it really sits down at the very tight end of ultra filtration if
you think about the conventional Technologies now in terms of how you think about you know the the issues that
you usually see with membranes we really have no problem with oil and grease we’ve done a couple projects for you
know food oil companies that have like emulsions with a couple percent oil in the water um and we can do water
extraction for Mills without a problem the chemistry is chlorine tolerant so uh we use bleach to clean we know no
concern if there’s bleach in the water obviously if you’re going to go on to another stage and we see a lot of use cases where people are using our
membranes to provide pre-treatment and then they’re going to polishing for RO if they want to reuse the water at at
that point you’re going to have to deal with the chlorine of course uh before it goes to an RO but you have a lot of options in terms of you know when you’re
looking at just the that kind of primary first stage of of filtration mainly we
think about solids honestly um you know it is still a membrane and they’re spiral wound they’re not going to do
great if you let let feathers and and macroscopic objects you know try to flow through them um so most of our
pre-treatment concerns are are in things like can we make sure that we’ve excluded larger solids that are going to
impinge you know within the ti clearances in the module can you tell us some field studies that you’ve had
experience with yeah so our earliest piloting work which is you know about
two and a half years ago now one of the first markets that we went after was Anor robic digestors um and so these are
you know um there’s a lot of different types out there and the ones that we focus on first are actually the the manure digestors that are increasingly
common in the Midwest and so these are primarily processing exactly what you think manure from cattle operations and
you know that’s a that’s a tough fluid to deal with so this is you’re you’re looking at the liquid fraction that
comes out of the digestor after the Anor robic digestion you’ve got a lot of Organics you’ve got some some fibrous
material to deal with too so it is a multi-stage process the partner that we’ve been working with
in that market does a kind of a screw press technology first to get all the fiber out then we go to the zco
membranes to provide that sort of primary organic concentration and that goes to very high recovery so these are
you know maximum water recovery operations um you’re targeting usually north of 90% uh permeate recovery from
those operations and then in that case uh they all then went on to rro and the
kind of cool thing about this process is there’s opportunities to valorize the concentrates because there’s a lot of
nitrogen and phosphorus and nutrients in those concentrates and so they have some uh some early work going on with with
actually then selling that into the fertilizer Market to help the cash flow of the operation so uh when we started
you know our field studies on this you know we were really focused on trying to learn about things like how often how
often do we need to clean these what kind of flux can we run at um you know any other concerns like that and and you
know we went through the usual we tried one set of conditions we tried another we seem to hone in on a solution that
worked and that’s been one of our more active commercial markets we have a number of those Anor robic digestors
that are up and running at full scale uh with our technology at this point what are some other industries that you’re in
and I’m curious what are some of the specific issues that come with those Industries sure so you know landfills
and landfill lee8 has has been a popular one and I mean obviously you talk to any landfill operator with lee8 right now
and and kind of the number one issue they’re dealing with is posos um in a lot of that that leate water so we have
a couple installations with landfills again these are these are multi-step trains with uh usually using this rco
super filtration followed by Aro to fully remove all the P compounds concentrate them you know these are
membrane Technologies they don’t destroy pasal um and so there are other Technologies out there that are designed
for that but what what a lot of them benefit from is concentration right so instead of treating two 200,000 gallons
a day through a a super critical water oxidation or or you know electrochemical
process you concentrate it down to maybe 20,000 gallons a day and that’s going to save a lot of capital on that Capital
intensive uh destruction step so that that’s kind of one issue and and we’ve we’ve got a couple commercial landfill
installations running probably the biggest theme that we see in the market right now is actually just in the food supply right so protein production as a
theme right so you look at um this is meat pure Seafood these are pretty water intensive
operations and that Wastewater has a lot of protein it has a lot of concerns with
salmonella and sort of you know disease transmission and what we’ve found ESP
you know in the US and even abroad is that the water issues for like a meat processor or or even some of the newer
like plant-based meats and some of the bioprocessed uh foods are are becoming pretty strategic for those companies so
so you know a few decades ago if you’re a chicken producer you’re thinking about your strategic plan and you’re going to
plan for an expansion and you need to make sure you can get enough chickens and that sort of thing water usually wasn’t on that list but what we’re
seeing now uh more and more is that you know when people are thinking about okay we’re going to build new you know meat
processing or chicken processing or something water’s pretty near the top of the list on strategic concerns to deal
with um I think you know there’s a there’s a public story out that Costco faced this so Costco went and tried to
vertically integrate and do their own broilers to keep that road history Broiler at the price point they wanted
and they ended up building you know a wastewater treatment plant basically because there was no infrastructure
available to deal with the Wastewater that they needed to to put in so that’s
that’s been a a theme we see we have a lot of um work going on in different
parts of that market right now between poultry between beef Seafood aquaculture
the these are all areas with a pretty high water intensity and the water
situation is often a sort of capacity limit for those plants so they might
have the space they have the capital they have the people to expand but the
infrastructure isn’t there either to give them more freshwat or to deal with more uh Wastewater discharge and then
obviously those are fairly consumer facing Brands and there’s a lot of brand value in in kind of being a leader in
water stewardship also what are some other ways that people are using your technology to increase their ability to
keep the water within their facility so they don’t have to bring on new water yeah so this is one of the the them that
kind of led us to our what’s now launching as our second product which is which is actually an RO technology you
know with theion technology and that’s where we’re seeing there was kind of a
wave of people you know put in a lot of industrial Ro both as say maybe treating the
surface water or the well water to go into their process and in many cases to to try to reuse water in that plant and
so there was a big wave of that that went in and and a lot of it works really well and some of it’s really struggling
with Organic fowling and so that’s that’s where we’re um have just launched uh that technology and that product
coming to market now and the the the first commercial elements just shipped uh earlier this month you know within
the effort to to do water reuse almost always that’s going to leave through an R membrane because people want that you
know really pure quality um it’s often going to lead through several other steps and so we have both the sort of
the super filtration pre-treatment that we can provide um especially like in a new construction you know when when
they’re putting in a process and maybe they haven’t figured out how to make it work yet but we’re increasingly also seeing the wave of of old I don’t want
to say old but but existing plants that have maybe an RO for reuse in that are that are really struggling with uptime
or with cleaning costs and things like that and and so sometimes these plants are like you know facing the difficult
decision do we have to shut this down because this just isn’t working we’re you know we’re chewing through cleaning chemicals um so that’s that’s kind of
one of the areas we see one of the the fascinating dilemmas with water reuse is of course it really starts to blur the
lines between what’s Wastewater and what’s Water and Wastewater and water have practical definitions they also
have legal definitions and so there is a lot of uh work that’s being done to try
to clarify these issues and this really hits hard in food where there is
understandably some pretty tight regulation about what Wastewater touches in a food plant and a lot of confusion
about when it goes from being Wastewater to water and uh the circumstances under which that can be done so we’re working
through that you know very carefully with some very informed partners and government partners and Industry Partners but one of the themes we see is
that often the first step in that water reuse for a plant rather than taking that reclaimed water and maybe going
back into the food production process they have all these other inciler uses of water on the facility they’re
watering the grounds they’re washing trucks they’re they’re doing cleaning and so often the first step in that sort
of water reuse rollout is going to be taking used food processing water
creating recycled water and then using that for non-food purposes therefore drawing down you know not using sort of
precious freshwater supply for uses where you can really just use reused water
Chris earlier you mentioned it was hard to build membranes out of hydrophilic materials can you speak more on that
yeah so there was an early wave of research in both spitter ions and many other hydrophilic materials of let’s
just try to put this onto an existing membrane make it more hydrophilic you know think of it like a surface treatment and there was a lot of
research that came out and and in some cases it seemed to make a difference but it would often wash away over time or
you know it would seem to to help the rate but not actually change the the end result and the outcome so what makes Z
CO’s technology unique is that first we we build that entire selective barrier
you know that that kind of film with all the pores is made out of that switter ionic material and so you know unlike a
a surface treatment where some fraction of the oil and grease is always going to get through your surface treatment and
then it ends up clogged in your membrane um the whole membrane’s made out of that surface treatment so this is actually a
pretty tough Material Science Challenge and you know if if any of your listeners
are familiar with how membranes have been made traditionally it kind of relies on using a lot of actually fairly
common basically Plastics things like nylon things like polyone
pvdf and then going through a manufacturing process to kind of coax that into being a porous material and
that entire process actually relies on the the fact that you know when those contact water they’re going to they’re
going to fall out of solution because they’re fundamentally Plastics that’s kind of how membrane casting Works to
build a membrane that’s so hydrophilic um that it that it’s immune to fouling you have to you have to approach the
problem a different way right you can’t rely on putting it in a solvent and dipping it in a water bath because it’s
gone it’s just going to dissolve in the water so what zco is founded on and the
really cool piece of the technology is you can think of it as combining the kind of one field of chemistry that’s
dealing with how can we make really hydrophilic materials and then there’s this other branch of chemistry on self-
assembling materials and so for a while you know you could there was like a journal of self- assembling materials
and a journal of hydrophilic materials you know and and this what’s cool about the technology is it really combines
these into one technology platform and so when we make our membranes we are
designing the materials they’re made out of I mean we make our own chemistry you know we do not we we have to
synthesize all the stuff we make these membranes out of and we can design those polymers and those materials to give
them the properties we’re looking for and the specific property we want is that when we form it into this film we
want water to be able to pass through right that’s the whole point and so by combining these kind of two different
fields of chemistry we have these materials that they do you know when you sort of apply them under the right
condition they self assemble into a poorest material and those poor structures are
made out of one of the most hydrophilic materials that we have access to and so
that’s kind of what makes it really powerful there’s a lot more that goes into the chemistry because we have to stabilize it we have to make sure it’s
you know durable and chemical resistant and all the other properties we need which is why we have to make our own
chemistry but we manufacture these in a fundamentally different way um you know our manufacturing lines don’t look like
a conventional brain manufacturing line because we’re we’re getting a lot of the performance that we want by the
chemistry that we’re starting with and you know sort of you can contrast that with buying what’s fundamentally a
normal plastic and then having a process to kind of coax it into being a membrane
these materials are fundamentally membrane materials Chris and we have experts on
the show there’s normally that one piece of information that if everybody knew it
would make your job easy it make our job easier what’s that one thing you want
everybody in the scaling up Nation to know about membranes that’s a great question you
know when we look at where are the sectors in the market and what are the challenges people are trying to solve in
those sectors there’s some low hanging fruit there’s some obvious ones you know and and obviously the people that
already realize this are like of course but you know when you think about the different types of technology that are
out there and and whether we’re talking about membranes whether Technologies you can kind of break most water treatment
Technologies down into things that do separation and things that do elimination and there there can be a
surprising amount of confusion on that you know so one one consequence is just like r or NF or UF every membrane
installation is you’re going to have a concentrate right you know everything we remove is going to end up in a much
smaller volume and you know we like in our our data shows we can usually um
achieve you know some of the highest recovery rates um that are available with membrane technology but it’s not
100% And so you know when we look at a lot of these plants and and we start doing you know trying to understand
their water problems you know occasionally we’ll get kind of down that road and realize oh you need this to
disappear you don’t need to separate it and so that’s that’s kind of one angle that that is helpful for people to think
about if they’re thinking about their say you’ve got a flow and you got you know I don’t know you know 500 PBM of
bod in it we can concentrate that right we we can we can give you clean water that’s low in oil and grease low in bod
but all that pounds of material still got to go somewhere and so uh it’s helpful to think through when you’re
thinking about your water challenges we can separate things we can combine them and there are Technologies on the market
you can digest them you can turn them into sludge but everything that’s coming
out of that operation has got to have a home eventually if we were able to get into a time machine and go into the
future where do you see the membrane technology going so what we’re working
on you know and the opportunities we see there’s there’s a couple Trends I think
that through talking to our customers we’re starting to pick up on you know I talked earlier about protein and food
and the really strong connection between the food supply chain and and water
scarcity and water issues and you can kind of go through the entire food chain
and just spot water issue after water issue especially as sort of Agriculture and farming is going through
intensification you know trying to get more out of each acre right that’s creating a lot of followon water issues
that of course then get even more compounded by by climate issues and drought and those sort of things so we
are in terms of the technology Focus we’re trying to understand where all those unmet needs are I think that
you’re going to see MBR is a very powerful technology that’s had a great roll out and you know I you know I of
course personally think it’s uh it’s a fantastic technology that probably needs some better and better membrane
materials that are more suited to handling these you know really high suspended solids and high organic
fractions a lot of people have issues with like foaming in their mbrs and then your options for antifoam are limited by
the membrane chemistry so I would expect you know if we have that time machine there’s probably a a really nice new
generation of MBR technology that is getting denser is getting more compact is getting more Capital efficient in
desalination of course the progress in polyamid seawater desalination
technology is just unbelievable and so you know you’re probably not going to see a magic membrane comes out that just
reduces the energy to do salination with fairly High certainty that’s not going to happen but what you do see is people
are trying to build desalination plants in less and less ideal areas and so as
countries and states are turning to desalination when they need to to increase their fresh waterer Supply they
don’t always have the luxury of picking an area with really low algae potential and really low biofouling and really
well-designed Beach Wells and all the the great you know uh techniques that have evolved to make those plants run at
these incredible specific energy values and you know even getting into the politics you see there’s there’s
increasing push back to like the really large scale 100 MGD 200 MGD desel plants
so I think one of the places that you will see membrane technology start to affect that is as you get more bof
filing resistant materials as you get more pre-treatment options that are more modular that scale down well you know
you start seeing these 20 MGD 50 MGD plants that are built in really non
ideal locations that have issues with algae that have issues with biofouling you don’t always have the luxury of
building a mega plant at the perfect spot uh you know the ocean by the way you have to trademark the term magic
membrane yeah exactly that’s we we’ll make it I promise that is that is uh
that is marketing genius right there let me ask if somebody wants to learn more
about the products from your company what should they do so uh you know
obviously we have a website and I’m actually excited to say our if you uh depending on when this airs we we do
have a new website uh coming out um in a few weeks that’ll have a lot more case study a lot more application data we are
also uh prepping to do a little bit of an unveiling of some of our Innovation
Center here so we’ve made some pretty large Investments uh both in our lab resources but also in in Pilot
manufacturing resources that we have at our disposal to bring new memoryand to Market and uh as that website relaunches
uh there will be I believe a tour it’s probably a more like a December January but that’ll that’ll be out there to
learn more about our Innovation process our team is really also active at a lot of the industry events so we’ve got a
bunch of people even this week in Europe at at AquaTech we’ll have folks giving Cas studies at at all the major
conferences you know through the conference season and we’ll make sure to have information on our show notes page
as well to make it easy for people to find you I got a couple of lightning round questions for you if you’re ready
for those sure let’s do it all right we spoke about a time machine before so we’re going to get back into that time
machine go back to your very first day as a chemical engineer what advice would you give
yourself oh that’s a tough one um I think you know one of the one of the things I wish I had had thought more
about earlier or known more about earlier is you know when you when you’re getting into the industry it’s you you
really need to put some thought into how you specialize right and so I didn’t
start my career in membranes actually I I worked uh for a little while in Material Science actually in the
electric industry and did a lot of work with PCB contamination and and insulating materials and and ironically
a lot of the chemistry lessons crossed over you know we’re wrapping wires in plastic films that enough to keep water
out there’s a lot of similarities actually in in some of the work but you know I think it’s not always uh obvious
how specialized some of these domains are and you know I think if you if you get the chance to talk to to one of the
the membrane gurus right that can just they’re everywhere you know I think
every membrane company has got a couple that just know how to make a membrane you don’t learn that in school right you
you learn that by making membranes and so you know if you’re a chemical engineer in the workforce you got to
realize that chemical engineering is is a pretty broad Endeavor and you’re gonna
need to be thinking about those really um specific skills that you’re going to need to acquire that are not in
textbooks so so that was something that wasn’t obvious to me in the beginning um and fortunately I found my way into it
and had some great mentors and and learned the trade but I think you know had I realized how critical those sort
of Industry specific skills are you know it really just emphasizes choose with
intention early and make sure that you know you realize that as you go down one road and pick up a bunch of skills and
you want to switch to a different type of field later you’re going to start over what are the last few books that
you’ve read well uh I guess I’ll start with the on the on the fiction side I
mean you know I guess we’ll start there uh I finally finished off it was a blue Mars so the the Kim Stanley Robinson
Trilogy um which took me a couple years of of fits and starts to go through all of them but that was that was great to
finish off on the non-fiction side there’s a great book called the nature of Technology the author’s name is
escaping me at the moment but I’m sure we we’ll get it in the show notes and it’s a really kind of fascinating story
to kind of weave through different um case studies of of sort of how
technology hits the market and then evolves and migrates and becomes what we know and see today because it’s it’s
actually pretty common you know when you get down to it you think of sort of mass adopted Technologies cell phones the
great example you know the internet they often look absolutely nothing like what people forecasted when they hit market
and so they go through this process that almost looks like Evolution you know in a biological sense so that was that was
a fascinating read what are some of your favorite membrane resources that you turn to sure so I
will be a little cush and say I have some fantastic people that are by far the best resource to go to there and and
I mean that quite literally um there are some great uh membrane texts out there are some wonderful journals and there’s
been some great new journals that have come out even with Journal membrane science but there’s um there’s a couple
other new ones and even open access ones that are out now but ultimately you know if you’re in membranes you’re going to
eventually meet one of these people that you say can you make a
15K UF membrane and it takes them like a day and and that’s hard to to write in a
book when Hollywood makes a movie about your life who do you want playing Chris
strover oh I I would be so privileged um I I will admit I am probably not uh up
to speed on the the current Cadre of of Hollywood stars to give a a sad answer to it but uh I I’ll just say I I hope
that they um don’t make me too eccentric because I I do have my moments of
normaly well if I get to take a stab at it I would say Ed Norton I I could live
with that you know I’m a I’m a product of the The Fight Club era um you know growing up uh with that as one of our uh
sneak out of the house and and uh go watch movies our parents didn’t want us to you’ve already said too much about Fight Club exactly exactly my last
question for you if you could talk with anybody throughout history who would it be with and why I I would be absolutely
fascinated to see the reaction of um some of the earlier figures especially in the industrial revolution you know as
people were you know you always think about how would people in history react to the modern era and you know reality
is for a lot of people through history it was you know probably some mix of of shock and disbelief but I I think it
would be really fascinating to talk to some of the late late 19th century people engaged in Science and Industry
because I think they they probably did have at that point the vision of of hey
this is the future and it would be fascinating to think to see you know for some of the early folks that were really
developing the field of chemical engineering you know and mechanical engineering that probably did think
about what future technology would hold and and in you or at least engage in that and and see uh see what their
thoughts are and and find out you know are are we ahead of pace or behind you know and I think I think you’d find
you’d find both you know there was certainly an arrow when it was like oh year 2000 we’re flying cars and that
certainly didn’t come to pass um but on the flip side I you know I don’t know
that uh a lot of people in that era conceived of the internet or or large
scale desalination and some of the things that are pretty easy to take for granted today Chris I want to thank you
for coming on the scaling up H2O podcast and educating us more about membranes
thank you it was my [Music] pleasure well Nation I am sure you have
learned something from that interview I know I did and like I said I remember a
footnote in a chemistry book about zwitter ions and maybe it had just been
a term that was defined but we did not go into it the way that Chris did today
so thank you Chris for coming on the scaling up H2O podcast and thank you for
bringing new technologies for us to consider how we’re doing Wastewater how
we’re taking care of our customers and I tell you that is a hard word to say
zwitter ion so with that maybe you can say it better than I can and now we all
know what that is and we all know what to look for nation the other day I I was
talking with somebody that was thanking me for recording some of our water
treatment guests and unfortunately some of our water treatment guests are no longer with us and last year was a big
year for losing a lot of people that are were very close to me in the industrial
Water Treatment Community one that comes to mind is Rob Ferguson and many of us
know Rob Ferguson because he was the person behind water cycle and water
cycle if you are creating a product for the Water Treatment Community Rob
created this database so you could predict how your product was going to
perform in different types of industrial water and Rob was just so gracious with
all the information that he had I know I talked to him on more than one occasion
and Rob was one of of those guys that just wanted to help everyone I remember when I was just starting out he told me
I couldn’t afford his software but eventually I would be able to and he gave me a copy I mean that’s just
amazing that’s the kind of guy he was and here’s the cool thing I was able to
record him it was one of my earlier episodes so maybe you want to hear from
Rob Ferguson well you can that’s going to be episode 43 and it’s entitled the
one with the water cycle guy now Rob had his own language when he spoke but he
was just such a wealth of knowledge on all things water treatment so here’s
something that I want to encourage everybody to do I hope everybody has a
mentor that somebody that they can talk to to help them get further in their
water treatment career in their water treatment knowledge and just have a great Rel relationship with eventually
we’re going to have to give all the knowledge that we have in our head to somebody else so they can carry that and
make that even greater so my next challenge for you is to try to be a
mentor for somebody else think of all the knowledge that you have inside your
head and why would you want to waste that why not share that with somebody
because when you do that that you’re improving the water treatment industry to whomever you’re talking with and
you’re having fun in the process here’s the other thing that happens though when
you share information with other people you now get to know the information that
you already know on a higher level because when you explain something to somebody when you teach it to somebody
it’s a totally different experience and through those question questions it’s
going to allow you to examine the information that you already know in a different way to get you to know it in a
different way I just get excited thinking about that because that’s something that I like to do with any
opportunity that I can get talking with somebody in this industry that’s why I
teach with the association of water Technologies that’s why I do this podcast that’s why I do coaching it’s
because it allows me to get information out allows me to gain a lot more information even information that I
already think I know I get to know it in a totally better and different way so
Nation I hope you take it from me and I hope you take advantage of that I also
hope that you tune in to a brand new episode next Friday until then have a
great week
folks do you wish you had your own private tutor to help you study for the
certified water technologist examination well now you do so many of you have
asked me to help you with the mock cwt examination and I’ve done that very
thing if you go to scaling up h2o.com cwt prep again that scaling up h2o.com
cwt prep you will see that I’ve created a course and I tell you everything I
know about each one of those mock questions it’s my hope that that helps
give you the confidence you need to sign up to get certified
today