Project description
Maintaining minerals in our drinking-water
Water is the molecule of life. It is essential for hydration and all our bodily functions. Calcium and magnesium are also essential to human health. Drinking water is an important source of mineral intake. The bioavailability of magnesium from drinking water is 12 times higher than in solid tablets. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the remineralisation of water with calcium and magnesium. The EU-funded WMT project has developed a novel water mineralisation process through the exploitation of the little-known physical phenomenon of developed hydrodynamic cavitation and vaporous and gaseous supercavitation. A major plus, this process can recover and re-use CO2 generated during the initial carbonation phase, eliminating a waste stream that currently adds to the high cost of desalination.
Objective
Climate change & water stress are changing the way we source drinking water. Although we have the technology to “clean” our drinking water, the same processes also strip out minerals essential to maintaining human health – especially water from desalination plants.
Calcium & magnesium are macrominerals essential to human health: insufficient intake of either can increase the likelihood of cardiovascular diseases, osteoporosis, colon cancer, Type 2 diabetes & neurodegenerative diseases. Water is not considered a major source of minerals, but it should be: the bioavailability of magnesium dissolved in water is 12 times higher than in solid tablets/capsule. As such, the WHO recommends that where possible the water should be re-mineralized with calcium and magnesium.
Remineralization has proved to be prohibitively expensive, laborious & limited in impact due to creating significant waste streams. There are no available solutions to cost effectively add magnesium to water & adding calcium is fraught with issues.
Watefy have revolutionized the water mineralization process through the exploitation of the little-known physical phenomenon of developed hydrodynamic cavitation & vaporous and gaseous supercavitation. To exploit this phenomenon, we have designed WMT – a simple, modular mineralization system, comprised of a Gasifier, Calcite/Magnesium Dissolver & Degasser. This revolutionary process, currently at TRL 6, overcomes the existing challenges of high cost in terms, reducing construction & maintenance costs by over 90%. This process is the first to recover & re-use CO2 generated during the initial carbonation phase, eliminating a waste stream that currently adds to the high cost of desalination. Operational costs are reduced by 95% for producing high quality, healthy water. The company is looking for funding to validate the technology at industrial scale & transform the water industry beginning with desalination plants, expected to reach €23.9 billion by 2025.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwater treatment processesdrinking water treatment processes
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistryalkaline earth metals
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncologycolorectal cancer
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicinecardiologycardiovascular diseases
- engineering and technologychemical engineeringseparation technologiesdesalination
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Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020
See other projects for this callSub call
H2020-SMEInst-2018-2020-1
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
4940304 PETAH TIKVA
Israel
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.