Desalination technology for the water challenge of the 21st century

Project Information

SonixED

Grant agreement ID: 969116

DOI

10.3030/969116

Project closed

EC signature date 10 May 2021

Start date 1 June 2021

End date 30 November 2023

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 3 277 250,00

EU contribution

€ 2 294 075,00

Coordinated by

HYDRO VOLTA
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SonixED (Desalination technology for the water challenge of the 21st century)

Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2023-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

- While nearly 70% of the world is covered with water, only 2.5% of it is freshwater. Even then, just 1% of the world freshwater is accessible, that is 0.03% of the earth’s water. As 70% of it is trapped into ground ice and permafrost, easily accessible freshwater is, in fact, less than 0.01% of water on earth!

- Desalination is a required solution, as ocean-based and other saline waters represent 97.5% of earth water!

-SonixED, a patented desalination technology, is a complete game changer. Thanks to the integration of ultrasound technologies, preventing fouling and optimizing the efficiency of the membrane, water recovery increases up to 60% with a lower power consumption, lowering operational cost per m3, that will make the water available for everyone everywhere.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We have redesigned, produced, and tested the first big-scale prototype of SonixED desalination module.

We have achieved many milestones:
- Design the first phase of the module for mass production and the production line
- Design the skids and modules for mass assembling and start to prepare the assembly line.
- Developing the monitoring tools and the data collecting system.
- Improved the communication, and sales capability and channels.
- We have prepared the first trial container, one for Seawater, the other one for Brackish Water that will be used in the field trials in 3 major use cases:
1. Seawater treatment to drinking water quality with Watergroep (Belgium),
2. With Farys and Aquaduin water supply companies (Belgium) will treat a mixed of Seawater & Brackish water to be drinkable water.
3. Treating and recycling waste water from the cooling towers' blowdown to be reused as fresh water quality with BASF (Germany).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Not only a better cost-efficient solution, SonixED reduces drastically CO2 footprint (from -15% to -25%), eliminates chemicals (from -22% to -44%), and reduces widely plastic waste (from -33% to -76%).
As only 2,5% of the water resources on our planet consists of freshwater, desalination technologies will become vital for populations. There is a dramatic growing need for access to freshwater, as water demand is predicted to increase significantly over the next decades, accelerated by Earth’s global warming. We assessed a global market gap for the next 10 years representing a third of total current existing desalination capacity.

Our skilled and highly motivated team is eager to meet the challenge of a world with more fresh water and less environmental damages for the global benefit of millions of people.

We want to produce and sell containers for Seawater and for Brackish water, including remote monitoring. SonixED is a €20bn market opportunity and competition is very scattered with relatively small local players. End-clients will be municipalities and industrial companies at a global scale.