Aquatech International, a water technology company which focuses on solving water scarcity through desalination, has partnered with PaniEnergy, an artificial intelligence (AI) analytics solution provider for water applications, to reduce the energy and cost associated with desalination, thereby encouraging further adoption of desalination solutions and addressing water security issues.
The partnership aims to augment Aquatech’s LoWatt® membrane desalination process with Pani’s artificial intelligence platform to reduce the energy required for desalination to levels that have not been achievable using existing approaches.
LoWatt is a low energy desalination process that integrates pre-treatment, an optimised reverse osmosis design and a proprietary cleaning mechanism to deliver what is currently the lowest specific energy consumption of reverse osmosis-based desalination. LoWatt’s performance is already better thank the current industry standard and offers additional advantages including higher reliability and better plant uptime, therefore reducing the overall cost of desalination. The integration of Pani’s software solution will help Aquatech further lower the energy consumption and establish a new industry standard of 2.7 kWh per cubic meter (m3). This lower energy consumption is expected to increase adoption of desalination in water scarce regions.
Desalination plays a critical part of solving water security issues and many more water scarce regions stand to benefit from desalination technologies, but high energy requirements and costs have limited uptake. The energy alone can account for more than 50% of a desalination plant’s operating cost. Artificial intelligence technologies such as Pani’s AI Coach™ promise to bring greater efficiencies to current technologies, making desalination an affordable option to meet the fresh water needs of many water scarce regions around the globe.
Pani CEO, Devesh Bharadwaj said: “By leveraging existing data, systems and people paired with machine learning techniques, current desalination technologies can be lifted to new standards of efficiency – making water less expensive to produce and delivering affordable, climate resilient water to people and communities in water stressed regions.”
Aquatech’s Chief Operating Officer, Ravi Chidambaran said: “With superior process design combined with advanced machine learning, Aquatech can provide a solution that reliably meets treatment goals while minimising energy consumption and O&M requirements in real-time. Aquatech is proud to welcome Pani as our official digital partner for LoWatt. This partnership enables us to better serve our customers and address the biggest pain points of desalination – energy consumption and biofouling.”
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