TOKYO, Japan – The eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality in South Africa will host a demonstration project using Hitachi’s RemixWater seawater desalination and water reuse integrated system.
The four-year project, which will produce 6,250 m3/day from wastewater, will take place until November 2020.
The RemixWater system works whereby salt concentration is reduced by mixing the water expelled through reverse osmosis (RO) membranes during the water reuse process with seawater.
Hitachi believes this leads to “decreases of reverse osmosis pressure in the filtering stage through RO membranes and achieves around 40% of decrease in pumping pressure of conventional desalination process”.
At the same time, it reduces salt concentration of brine discharged into the sea to approximately 3.5%, the same level as seawater, according to the company.
One of the aims of the demonstration project is to accomplish a 30% energy saving compared with existing desalination systems.
The RemixWater system was developed by the Global Water Recycling and Reuse Solution Technology Research Associationm as part of Japanese development organisation, New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation’s (NEDO) Water Saving and Environmentally-friendly Water Recycling Project from Fiscal Year 2009 to 2013.
The system stably produced 1,400 cubic meters of water per day for approximately three years, from April 2011, in the Water Plaza Kitakyushu, a plant constructed and operated by the Global Water Recycling and Reuse Solution Technology Research Association.
It was in April 2016 when Hitachi established its water business unit.
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