The difficulties in bringing innovations conceived by researchers in laboratories to industry are one of the major obstacles suffered by research. Acció's Tecniospring program, which depends on the Department of Business and Knowledge, seeks to overcome this gap by promoting the incorporation of research talent into companies and technology centers, with 100% funding for their hiring.
This program has supported researcher Raquel Garcia Pacheco and her circular economy project that extends the useful life of filters in desalination plants. A large desalination plant can have up to a total of 20,000 membranes installed for seawater treatment. The desalinated water obtained is used for multiple purposes, such as drinking water supply and irrigation. These filters are renewed every five to ten years and are thrown directly into landfills or incinerators. Specifically, more than one million filters are discarded globally each year, with a high environmental cost.
Garcia Pacheco has developed a technology that reuses the membranes used in desalination plants for water purification treatments and allocates them to other water treatment plants. The recycling of these membranes allows offering a new use so that they can be reused in other smaller facilities, dedicated to the production of water for irrigation, industrial processes, and wastewater treatments.
"We are able to regenerate the membranes without significantly altering their initial properties, but we also recycle them by converting them into new products," explains Garcia Pacheco. Regarding the new recycled filters, the researcher points out that they continue to separate viruses and bacteria and, depending on the type of recycled product, they are also capable of continuing to separate salts.
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The Girona technology center Lequia hired the researcher in 2019 thanks to this aid from Acció to jointly develop her project. In the first year of the project, the researcher has worked in Australia, at the University of New South Wales, where she has developed a new system to transport the recycled membranes.
In the second year, already at the Lequia center of the University of Girona, Garcia Pacheco's invention had an industrial application in the company Telwesa, thanks to the donation of used membranes by Sacyr Agua and the support of Imdea Agua for the initial laboratory tests. "With Telwesa, we have tested the regenerated membranes in their facilities to treat landfill wastewater," explains Garcia Pacheco. "Half of the installation has operated with this type of membranes for a year, and the water production and its quality have been similar to that of commercial membranes," he notes. Looking ahead, Garcia Pacheco and the Lequia center plan to launch a spin-off to continue the initial project, which already has a European patent application.