Some ceramic membrane advocates
may not like what I am saying here, but I believe the window of opportunity in
the U.S. for ceramic membranes is closed… Ten to fifteen years ago when many of
the polymeric membranes on the market had significant integrity issues, there
was a lot of interest in ceramic membranes offering warranties of 20 years or more
and virtually no breakages over this period. At that time the leading
manufacturer of ceramic membranes for large municipal systems was Metawater (know
as NGK up to 2008) with a large installed base in Japan. Originally Metawater
had an exclusive arrangement in the US to sell through Kruger and a contract
for a 5 MGD system was secured with Parker CO around 2009. At this time, Memcor
and Zenon, two of the largest membrane system suppliers at the time, had
experienced a lot of membrane integrity issues at many installations helping to
create a lot of interest in ceramic membranes. Despite this interest, high
costs of ceramic membranes and the systems prevented adoption for drinking
water applications at any other large-scale installations (see my 2011 post).
Around 2015, when Metawater had started selling their ceramic system directly rather than
through Kruger, a 7 MGD system was installed at Butte MT. I wonder if selling
through Kruger was not the best strategy, where Kruger was not well known as a
membrane system supplier and had a large suit of established water treatment
technologies (such as Actiflo) that would have diluted the sales and marketing
effort towards its ceramic membrane systems. I think the opportunity was missed
to sell a lot more ceramic membrane systems 15 years ago.
Membrane Integrity Advantage over Polymeric has diminished the Past 10 years
At the time that Memcor and Zenon were having their membrane integrity issues, Pall with the Asahi membrane was quickly establishing a reputation of having a very robust membrane with minimal fiber breakages and was quickly gaining market share. Riding on the back of Pall’s success, around 2010, companies such as Toray and Dow (now Dupont) brought membranes to market that had similar fiber thicknesses, same material (PVDF) and were outside-in pressurized modules as were Asahi’s. As OEMs such as Wigen Water Technologies and H2O Innovation installed systems with these membranes it was found that these membranes did have significantly improved integrity compared to the earlier Memcor and Zenon submerged membranes. I do have to mention that as the early pioneers of large-scale MF and UF membranes, Memcor and Zenon were learning on the run about membrane materials, module construction and cleaning regimes. The later entrants to the market have capitalized on these developments to produce very good membrane modules the past ten years.
With much improved polymeric membranes available now, plus the ability to have Open Platform/Universal MF/UF racks, I do believe the opportunity for wide adoption of ceramic membranes for standard municipal applications has passed. I discussed this with some ceramic membrane veterans (ex Metawater, PWNT and Nanostone) at AWWA's ACE in San Antonio last month and they said there are still good opportunities in Europe for replacing some of the older, poor performing UF membranes (I assume these are inside-out PES membranes), none of which really gained traction in the U.S., with the exception of the Inge/Dupont multibore membrane which is a lot stronger than its predecessors. But I have to say it looks like ceramic membranes will remain to a niche product in the U.S. in the foreseeable future as I predicted in my post back in 2011.
The comments and opinions in this post are my own and not those of my employer.
