Low temperature evaporation

What it does

We treat liquid hazardous waste from industries such as foundries, workshops and recycling companies.This waste commonly consists of 95-99% water and with our technology, we can separate a majority of the water from the waste and reduce its volume by up to 98%

Your inspiration

Our solution was first developed to clean seawater, but due to the low cost of water in the nordics we couldn't convince customers to buy desalination machines. Luckily, one of the customers we approached asked if our technology could treat water contaminated by heavy metals, PFAS and oil residue. We accepted this challenge and succeeded in treating their waste with satisfying results. Looking back, the switch to treating liquid waste instead of sea water made our impact on the environment even greater, something we are more than happy about.

How it works

The method works by letting heated liquid waste flow through specially designed cellulose blocks where large amounts of water surface is exposed. Behind the block, a large fan blows a steady flow of air through the block. When this air makes contact with the surface of the hot fluid, 3-8 % of the water in the liquid waste instantly evaporates into water vapor. This vapor is then condensed using cold water pipes, and the resulting condensed water can be reused in the factories. All evaporation and condensation occur in a closed, insulated wind tunnel to preserve the air's momentum and reduce heat loss. The waste that isn't evaporated is reheated with industrial excess heat and then recirculated in the machine to increase the waste concentration. When sufficient concentration level is reached, the liquid waste is released continuously via a small sideflow to a buffer tank, waiting to be sent to destruction. This method is Explained in picture 2.

Design process

After watching a documentary about how a company built greenhouses in desert environments, cooling down the crops by evaporating seawater, we got the inspiration to develop our new desalination method. As a high school project, we constructed our first prototype (picture nr 3) that could clean 700 liters of water per day. With the results from our prototype we attracted an investment (no equity) from a heavy industry company as well as governmental support to construct a full scale pilot facility (picture 4) to verify the technology in an industrial environment. We scaled up the design from our prototype and constructed a pilot that was capable of cleaning more than 40.000 liters/day. After this pilot study we commercialized the design to a more cost efficient construction and tried to launch our technology on the market, but previously mentioned, customers were not interested in paying more for water. In the middle of 2021, we changed focus to clean liquid hazardous waste and changed our design and materials to handle more viscous and aggressive fluids. After developing the technology to treat liquid waste for 8 months, we started to construct our first commercial evaporation unit which is currently being installed at a factory in the city of Halmstad. (Picture 1)

How it is different

Evaporation as a concept is nothing new, it's being used in anything from pulp manufacturing, & sugar crystallization to waste treatment & juice concentration. But conventional evaporation technology such as falling film-, vacuum- or MVR-evaporators all consume large amounts of high quality energy such as steam, electricity or high temperature excess heat. With our design, we can work with excess heat down to 40°C, meaning that we can utilize energy that would otherwise be lost in cooling towers. Compared to vacuum evaporators, which are currently being used by a potential customer of ours, we can reduce their total energy consumption by 95% by using excess heat instead of district heating as an energy source. Our design with container sized evaporation units that can be placed outside also makes it easier for our customers to implement our technology in their production.

Future plans

Our focus is to scale our business within the liquid hazardous waste industry, get our technology to the market and make a positive impact as fast as possible. We are aiming to raise our first investment in November to start serial production of our evaporation units. We are also conducting trails with pulp manufacturers to evaporate black liquor, and have received a grant from the Swedish Energy Agency to scale up these tests. If we would introduce our evaporation technology to all the paper mills in Sweden, we could reduce the country's total CO2 emission by 1%.

Awards

We have won the following awards or been acepted into: Innovation grants from Vinnova, the Swedish innovation agency Venture Cup Sweden, Gamechanger 2019 Stockholm Junior Water Prize (Sweden) Water challenge 2021 (Venture Cup, Microsoft, Ikea) Innovation grants from the Swedish Energy Agency Climate KIC Nordic accelerator