Saltworks Technologies and SPX Cooling Technologies, a global manufacturer of cooling towers and air-cooled condensers, have entered a teaming agreement to provide evaporation towers and engineering support for Saltworks’ energy efficient desalination and salt water treatment process.
The core of Saltworks’ breakthrough technology, called Thermo-Ionic™, works by harnessing low grade solar or waste heat to evaporate saltwater to create a concentrated solution. The system uses the energy contained within this concentrated salt solution to drive the desalting process.
Saltworks and SPX Cooling Technologies are developing an evaporator tower driven salt-maker to work alongside this Thermo-Ionic technology. Built largely from plastics, the salt-maker accepts highly concentrated salt water, removes remaining water, and produces solid salt.
Saltworks’ President Joshua Zoshi says using an evaporative tower in their Thermo-Ionic process allows Saltworks to create a hyper-saline solution in a compact footprint.
“We are delighted to be working with SPX Cooling Technologies. Through this collaboration we will deliver an economic solution for addressing customers’ desalination and salt water treatment needs while leveraging the strengths of a company with over 100 years in the cooling tower business.”
In addition to standalone operation, Thermo-Ionic™ can hybridize with conventional desalination, such as reverse osmosis, to increase freshwater recovery and reduce discharge volume which is particularly important for inland operations.
Currently Saltworks is constructing a demonstration plant to showcase their end-to-end solution for a Canadian oil sands project.
Saltworks Technologies is a leader in the development and delivery of solutions for industrial wastewater treatment and lithium refining. By working with customers to understand their unique challenges and focusing on continuous innovation, Saltworks’ solutions provide best-in-class performance and reliability. From its headquarters in Richmond, BC, Canada, Saltworks’ team designs, builds, and operates full-scale plants, and offers comprehensive onsite and offsite testing services with its fleet of mobile pilots.
Saltworks delivers reliable solutions for data center cooling that maximize uptime and energy efficiency while helping meet water sustainability goals. Our modular, low footprint systems can optimize cooling cycles, reduce scaling, and minimize wastewater disposal volumes.
Reverse osmosis-based brine concentrators are reaching new performance levels not seen before. Saltworks is pleased to report that a substantial pilot plant is currently demonstrating 99% freshwater recovery on cooling tower blowdown (CTB).
Cooling towers are used by industrial plants to reject waste heat to atmosphere. A portion of the cooling water is blown down after a number of cycles of concentration, before the ions and metals reach their scaling limits. This blowdown requires management.
The many options for managing brine, a term for saline wastewater from industrial processes, fall under two categories: brine treatment and brine disposal. Brine treatment involves desalinating the brine for reuse and producing a concentrated brine (lower liquid waste volume), or residual solids (zero liquid discharge).