Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2018-2019).

Current Water Technologies Inc. (formerly ENPAR Technologies Inc.) located in ON, Canada is a waterx000D
treatment company that is focused on the treatment of industrial municipal, run-off and flood water. Thex000D
company has high experience and strong expertise in separation of contaminations and chemicals such asx000D
arsenic, nitrate, ammonia, sulfate, hydrocarbons and other organic matter. To solve the problem of clients inx000D
treatment of oily wastewater systems, the company is interested in separating the organic compounds in ax000D
process that minimizes the negative impacts of solids. Current technologies to separate the oil contaminants arex000D
not energy efficient and they are composition dependent. In dilute oil contaminations, the oil volume isx000D
significantly smaller than that of the water phase, so the separation process has to be highly selective to makex000D
the process sustainable and economically viable. Conventionally, hydrophilic membrane separation is used inx000D
the oil-water separation. This method suffers from low energy efficiency for the dilute oil concentrationx000D
because the membrane pressure drop and maintenance correlate to the flow rate of the permeate. Although, thex000D
company believes in hydrophobic membranes to solve this problem, they are not able to implement the ideax000D
due to the lack of expertise in design of this particular membrane. Thus, we propose a novel oil-waterx000D
separation methodology, using functionalized mesh-based membranes that only allows the permeation of oil.x000D
These membranes will be utilized in a process design that continuously separates the oil at a lower energyx000D
input. It features a higher separation efficiency while reducing the maintenance costs due to membrane damage.x000D
The proposed idea targets industries that produce oily wastewater. It will particularly benefit Canada tox000D
maintain its pioneering position in developing sustainable processes with minimized environmental footprints.x000D
Canadian industries such as heavy oil production (AB, SK, and BC), aviation (QC), automobile manufacturingx000D
(ON), agriculture (SK, ON), fishery (NL), and food processing (in most provinces) can potentially benefit fromx000D
the research outcomes.