Summer is nearly over! Funny how times flies. Quinton, Martin and I were in Denver last week to commission Chimaera, our hybrid RO system. This pilot was an important step towards scale-up and we learned a lot. More on that below, after some updates:

Lowlights

• Cash crunch. We are low on cash, with payments overdue from our Singapore client and our XPRIZE payment not expected until early fall. We should get through but it is a stressful situation.

• Blue Screen of Death (again). The HMI (Human Machine Interface) on Searay crashed last week, leaving our Singapore customers unable to operate. We worked with Kevin to identify a cost-effective and timely fix: buying a mini PC in the States, loading our software onto it, and shipping it to Singapore. In the meantime, our customers have been able to get Searay back up and going but this has been frustrating. Maybe we’ll move on to Linux.

Highlights

• Headway with commercial partners. Christine met with several companies in Europe while Haig revived conversations with existing contacts. We are working on lifecycle cost estimates and a pilot quote for two prospects. Applications include cooling towers and oil & gas.

• New website. Our previous website had been up for two years. That one explained our technology in too much detail. The goal with this website is to entice customers to reach out to us by including just enough information. We’ve also get a nice map showing our previous and past projects and have a new ‘team’ section.

• Sent in our submission to Track B of the XPRIZE Water Scarcity. Track B covers Novel Materials and Methods and has a $10.9M prize purse. Our proposal discusses the development of membrane elements tailored for high-pressure (to 120 bar and beyond) elements for batch RO and LRO.

Marketing campaign
With our new website launched and two of our five 2025 pilot commissioned, we are launching a marketing campaign to spread the word about Harmony and our batch technology. Phase 1 has just gone out and the message is: regular RO is outdated. More coming soon.

More on Chimaera

We spent the week in Denver last week. Strong sun and quick showers in the afternoon.

Chimaera is a pilot project funded by the National Alliance for Water Innovation with support from the DoD. The NAWI study is focused on comparing different batch processes (our bladder-based process vs. a double-acting piston design). DoD pitched in funds to investigate the use of semi-batch RO to concentrate PFAS.

Hybrid RO system. We call this system Chimaera because it is unique in being able to operate five different RO processes: regular RO, pulseflow RO, semi-batch RO, batch RO (piston) and batch RO (bladder). This enables us to get a direct comparison between different RO processes but also makes the design more complex. Our typical batch systems require four two-way valves. Chimaera has seven three-way valves. We spent all of Tuesday afternoon sorting through the appropriate valve positions to properly flush and refill the system.

Our biggest system yet. At 40 gpm (200 m3/day) of production capacity, this was our first pilot where we finally used full-size membrane elements (8” diameter). More importantly, this pilot used our longest bladders yet (~4m) and required operation of two bladders in parallel. This was our first time operating multiple bladders simultaneously. We ran in to some issues earlier in the week but by Sunday the Mines team was able to run batches smoothly.

Coming together
Over the last half year our team has gained experience and advanced batch RO to higher pressures (Searay @ 80bar) and larger flows (Chimaera @ 200m3/day). We now feel much more comfortable scaling up to our large seawater demonstration plant (1,000m3/day) which will utilize 16”x6m bladders.

Looking ahead
We will have some nice data to share from Chimaera over the next several weeks. Unfortunately we are sworn to secrecy regarding data from Searay.

-quantum