In Memory of Hung Nguyen – The Father of MIEX®

At the AWWA Annual Conference in Denver in June a past colleague from my days at ICI/Orica told me that Dr. Hung Nguyen had recently passed away due to cancer. Hung had left Orica about 5 years ago and as far as I am aware had mostly cut his ties with the water industry, doing some consulting work in other industries. Thus his passing went largely unnoticed in the water community. Hung deserves more than to quietly depart the world without recognition of his significant contribution to the advancement of the water industry in Australia and the US, so I thought I would document his major achievements while I worked with him for about 15 years at ICI Australia/Orica, namely in bringing the MIEX® Technology to market.

The development of the MIEX® resin and water treatment process is well documented as a team effort between the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) who developed the resin, South Australian Water Corporation who developed the water treatment application and ICI Australia (later to become Orica after divestment by ICI PLC) who commercialized the technology. I was working with ICI Australia’s Watercare Division in the early 90s when Division General Manager Murray Winstanley was convinced by Prof. Don Bursill of SA Water to have ICI step in and help bring Don’s dream to reality - an ion exchange process using CSIRO’s magnetized resin to remove dissolved organic carbon from drinking water supplies, a major inhibitor of good water quality in Don’s home state. Murray knew he needed to bring in a manager who could crack the whip on the researchers from CSIRO and SA Water and turn this good idea into a commercial proposition.

Hung Nguyen was the ideal man for the job, having worked at ICI when the company tried to commercialize the Sirotherm process in the 70s, a similar magnetic ion exchange resin developed by CSIRO for brackish water treatment that was mothballed after unsuccessful field trials. I think Hung had a role in ICI’s mothballing decision, so Murray knew he would call a spade a spade and kill the technology if he thought it would not be viable at full-scale. Hung moved over to the Watercare Division as Technical Manager and became my manager. While I was not immediately working on the MIEX® project (at that time the technology was called MIER by CSIRO), I heard all about Hung’s dealings with CSIRO and SA Water as we all know Hung liked to chat to his colleagues on every detail of his business conquests. He reeled in a lot of the tangential research (such as using chromium as the magnetic component which would never fly in drinking water) and got the CSIRO’s researchers to focus on producing a resin that could be used in a conventional type water treatment process and therefore could be easily scaled up. He also secured a significant Federal research grant that allowed a large scale reactor to be built at the CSIRO’s Clayton campus which sped up the scale-up of the production process as well as produced the resin for the first full-scale MIEX® installations.

Hung was also one of the first board members on the Cooperative Research Center for Water Quality and Treatment and through this international network of water industry experts, was able to facilitate the first introductions of the MIEX® technology to the United States through the AWWA Research Foundation, Universities of North Carolina and Colorado, etc. - connections that helped me a lot when I first moved to the United States in 2000 to introduce the technology here.

Hung may have rubbed some researchers the wrong way speaking his mind but he got job done and was one of those rare people that could successfully bridge the gap between research and industry. Without Hung’s input, MIEX® may not have been anything more than another research project and good idea.

In recent years Hung had little involvement with the mainstream water industry in Australia and the United States. So I couldn’t let Hung’s memory fade away without recognizing his significant contribution into developing one of the most innovative new water treatment technologies in the past decade, with now over 30 systems installed in the USA and others in Australia, the UK and Asia. I am also very grateful to Hung for his positive influence on my career and involvement in the water industry.