Project description
Adsorbents making drinking water safe
Good water quality and adequate sanitation are considered essential by the UN to combat poverty and promote sustainable living. Insufficient water quality, low sanitation and poor hygiene are responsible for millions of deaths each year. The presence of heavy metals in potable water is dangerous for human health. The EU-funded Hybead project aims to advance technology that separates heavy metal ions from drinking water. It will estimate the feasibility of promoting these bead-type absorbents in the market. Firstly, the project will develop economically profitable product versions and production techniques. In the second phase, they will focus on intellectual property and study market needs.
Objective
Each year, millions of people, most of them children, die from diseases associated with inadequate water supply, sanitation and hygiene. In particular, exposure to heavy metals in drinking water, even at trace levels, poses a considerable health risk. As included in one of the seventeen sustainable development goals of the United Nations, “safe water and adequate sanitation are indispensable for healthy ecosystems, reducing poverty, and achieving inclusive growth, social well-being and sustainable livelihoods”. In this PoC project, named Hybrid Bead Adsorbents (Hybead), we aim to evaluate the feasibility of advancing Hybrid Inorganic Nanoparticle/Metal-Organic Frameworks Bead-type adsorbents into the pre-commercial stage, with the aim of accelerating their access to the market as an efficient technology for removing heavy metal ions from water.
The first part of Hybead encompasses scaling-up of our current spray-drying synthesis of these beads from the gram-scale to economically viable kilogram-scale production. We will also shape the composite beads for proving its use into existing water purification technologies. This will entail shaping Hybead into granules and integrating them as fillers into polymer matrices to produce membranes by common industrial-scale methods (e.g. compaction and solvent casting). The second part of Hybead will be dedicated to intellectual property (IP) and market aspects needed for the pre-commercialization of this new technology for water purification. This study will include a patentability study, a freedom-to-operate (FTO) analysis and a market study to identify the filter producers that could ultimately serve as manufacturing partners.
In this project we will endeavor to assess the commercial viability of with Hybead adsorbents, accelerate their market entry and ultimately, explore the possibility of launching a spin-off to manufacture and commercialize viable products.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwater treatment processesdrinking water treatment processes
- engineering and technologychemical engineeringseparation technologiesdesalinationreverse osmosis
- natural scienceschemical sciencespolymer sciences
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- engineering and technologynanotechnologynano-materials
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-POC-LS - ERC Proof of Concept Lump Sum PilotHost institution
08193 Cerdanyola Del Valles
Spain