Membrane Technologies

Reverse Osmosis, Forward Osmosis, Nanofiltration, Ultrafiltration, & Microfiltration Technologies

ApHinity offers a comprehensive suite of membrane separation technologies with the primary purpose of being able to implement the right technology for any given application. This includes Reverse Osmosis, Forward Osmosis, Nanofiltration, Ultrafiltration, and Microfiltration technologies.

ApHinity can offer a wide arrangement of reverse osmosis technologies for customer applications ranging from standard low salinity reverse osmosis (<10,000 ppm TDS), to medium salinity (sea water desalination), to high salinity applications (<200,000 ppm TDS) without the use of evaporator or other phase change technologies. If you have a specialty application for reverse osmosis technology, please contact us to discuss your treatment options.

Forward Osmosis is a water processing solution for extreme salinity and high suspended solids water conservation applications utilizing the science of low-pressure Forward Osmosis with a patented membrane separation technology. The patented membrane design combined with a specialty brine draw chemistry can produce water quality up to reverse osmosis permeate standards while maintaining an extremely low membrane fouling factor and superior flux rate. This unique characteristic makes the forward osmosis membrane technology beneficial in applications with high total suspended solids, BOD, and COD levels where traditional reverse osmosis and nanofiltration technologies fail.

Nanofiltration is a technology that is gaining significant momentum in many industrial applications. NF purifies water similarly to RO except that it only partially removes dissolved minerals. Thus, by not purifying the water to the extend that RO membranes purify water, thus making the water less corrosive on piping infrastructure. Nanofiltration has the ability to filter out suspended particles, sugars, colloids, microorganisms (bacteria, virus, and fungus), along with partial dissolved ion removal. This unique characteristic of NF allows it to be used to “engineer” the quality of the water for an application where maybe not complete RO permeate quality is required, but significant levels of ion removal is beneficial. Many emerging applications for the use of NF is in healthcare where comprehensive filtration of all potable water to the healthcare facility is desired, which includes microorganism purification of the influent water source.

Microfiltration and Ultrafiltration are membrane separation technologies that filter water sources down to the 0.1 micron and 0.01 micron absolute levels respectively without removing dissolved ions. Typical application use for Microfiltration is separating suspended particles, oil, and grease from water where treatment levels of 0.1 micron are required. Ultrafiltration is separating suspended particles, colloids, and microorganisms (virus, bacteria, and fungus) removed from water at levels down to 0.01 micron particle size. ApHinity technology MF and UF membranes can be either spiral wound or hallow fiber membranes. One unique characteristic of MF and UF spiral wound membranes are the structural backing which allows spiral wound membranes to be backflushed.