Capabilities
Clean Membranes offers its customers and partners extensive expertise and experience in materials science, ultrafiltration membrane development, and product development, all focused on water treatment. We offer responsive and cost-effective product solutions to address a broad range of water treatment needs.
We offer both innovative membrane technologies and new product configurations, and we incorporate them into the design and manufacture of cost-effective product solutions, both standard and custom, to meet our customers’ water treatment needs.
Water Treatment
Our focus is water. Our outreach spans multiple industries- oil/gas, emergency drinking water, industrial process water, purified water, and commercial wastewater recycle. Our interest is to help our customers and partners get the water they need from the water they have. We know water chemistry and we understand water contamination. We know how to assemble the best available technologies in a way that works best for efficiency and effectiveness, whether it is for pretreatment to RO for critical research, or polishing water for industrial purposes, or cleaning up sand filter backwash in competitive swimming pool facilities, or reusing complex and hazardous produced water from oil and gas operations.
Membrane Science and Technology
Our core science and technology skills lie in the understanding, development, and application of membrane-based filtration technologies, as well as the identification and integration of complementary technologies and systems needed to produce an optimized water treatment solution. In-house expertise and experience in microfiltration (MF), ultrafiltration (UF) and reverse osmosis (RO) membrane technologies are complemented with university and partner expertise. We work on optimizing the application of our current membrane technology, as well as developing new technologies and bringing these technologies to market.
One very promising breakthrough is our patented Smart Comb™ ultrafiltration technology. This technology is based on a co-polymer that “self-assembles” into a hydrophilic membrane surface. It effectively minimizes irreversible fouling, achieving maximum recovery of membrane flux at lower cost, using less energy, and without the use of chemicals for cleaning.
Treatment Analysis
We leverage our expertise in membrane science and our knowledge of water treatment to develop innovative solutions to new and existing water treatment challenges. How can we best eliminate contaminants? How can we do that cost-effectively? How can we save owners, operators, and facility managers time and money? We have worked on a range of common problems, and we have also developed solutions to emerging problems, such as oil and gas produced water. It’s a process. Typically, we work closely with a customer or group of customers to analyze a problem in the laboratory, design a cost-effective and practical solution, and implement that solution in the field.
Pilot Trials
Piloting in the field or at a customer site is a key part of the treatment solution design and validation process. We can offer standard treatment system designs for well understood treatment applications, which can be piloted prior to sale, or we can work with our customers to develop custom treatment designs that are based upon the process of laboratory analysis and testing, integrated treatment system design, and one or more stages of field validation through piloting.
System Design
For both standard and custom systems, a critical capability is system design and integration. We strive to make systems work efficiently, perform reliably and withstand the rigors of their environment, whether it’s an on-demand RO pretreatment system for critical laboratory work or an emergency drinking water system for rapid mobilization in a disaster zone. The operational demands for a laboratory water system and an emergency drinking water system may be different, but they share the design objectives of easy operation, durable performance and value to the customer.
Manufacturing
In addition to our in-house treatment system design capabilities, we have partnered with firms, such as Innovative Products and Equipment, to design the most reliable and cost-effective products, based upon our own knowledge and understanding of the treatment process. Our goal is to manufacture the most cost-effective and highest quality systems possible to reliably meet our customers’ needs.
Initial membrane products are developed, assembled and tested at our facility in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts. We also conduct hollow fiber membrane development at this facility, but, for larger scale membrane manufacturing runs and membrane cartridge assembly, we have partnered with Polymem, a major UF manufacturer.