WMD, the drinking water utility of the province of Drenthe in the Netherlands, has initiated a pilot project with NX Filtration. The objective of the pilot project is to test director nanofiltration (dNF) technology on the removal of various micropollutants from WMD’s groundwater sources.
WMD services over 200,000 households and companies across Drenthe with the supply of drinking water. Amongst its key initiatives as part of its 2023 vision, WMD seeks to invest in new water treatment technologies to remove an increasing amount of micropollutants from water derived from groundwater sources. These pollutions, which include nickel-iron alloys (Ni/Fe) and ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA), are mostly a result of agricultural and industrial activities in the second half of the last century.
Initial lab-scale tests with NX Filtration’s dNF technology demonstrated “high removal of Ni/Fe, EDTA and other micropollutants”. Therefore, WMD now decided to expand its pilot programme to test dNF technology in a full-scale setting, based on NX Filtration’s large scale Mexpert pilot system.
Key advantages of the dNF technology for WMD include the one-step treatment setup that can be applied directly to the source water, the fact that desirable minerals remain part of the produced water, and the energy-saving and chemicals-avoiding characteristics of NX Filtration’s dNF technology.
The pilot programme is expected to run from November 2021 to the summer of 2022.
