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4Membrane Technology April 2008

said: ‘Armed only with an idea Dr Pall founded Pall in a garage in Queens, New York, over 60 years ago, never envisioning the myriad ways his passion for technology innovation would affect the world’.

Based in Akron, Ohio, the National Inventors Hall of Fame was established by the US Patent & Trademark Office and the National Council of Intellectual Property Law Associations to hon-our women and men responsible for the great technological advances that make human, social and economic progress possible.

Contact:

Pall Corp, 2200 Northern Boulevard, East Hills, NY

11548, USA. Tel: +1 516 484 5400, www.pall.com

AMTA and SEDA organise major conference

The American Membrane Technology Association (AMTA), with its affili-

ate the Southeast Desalting Association (SEDA), is organising and running what it claims will be one of the largest and most comprehensive membrane events ever held in the USA.

Scheduled to take place on 14–17 July 2008 in Naples, Florida, the ‘AMTA/SEDA 2008 Joint Conference & Exposition’ will start with two pre-conference workshops, which are sponsored by the National Water Research Institute and the Affordable Desalination Collaboration. Over 80 presentations in concurrent sessions, followed by committee and board meetings, will be held over the three days that follow. These sessions will offer practical and pertinent information on various membrane technologies, including presentations that are targeted at novices, say the event’s organiser.

Over 20 presentations are planned that cover various components used in membrane plants, such as pumps, energy-recovery systems, con-trols, pretreatment and post-treatment units. Several sessions are also dedicated to planning, procurement and financing membrane plants.

All types of membrane technology will be discussed, including bioreactors, microfiltra-tion, ultrafiltration, nanofiltration, brackish and sea-water reverse osmosis desalination, and electrodialysis reversal.

As part of the conference, tours to membrane facilities are also planned. These will provide attendees with an opportunity to view two large and impressive membrane plants.

Contact:

American Membrane Technology Association, 2409 SE

Dixie Highway, Stuart, FL 34996, USA. Tel: +1-772-463-

0820 Email: admin@amtaorg.com, www.amtaorg.com

Sartorius’ results highlight a successful fiscal year

The latest financial results from international process and labora-

tory technology provider the Sartorius Group show that fiscal 2007 was a successful and strategically important year for the company.

Sartorius says that it further developed its global group structure to meet future trends by acquiring Toha Plast GmbH of Goettingen, Germany during January 2007, merging its Biotechnology Division with France’s Stedim SA in the summer of 2007, selling its hydrodynamic bearings business during the second half of the year and reorganising its operations in the USA.

Chief Executive Officer Dr Joachim Kreuzburg commented: ‘We created the prerequisites for contin-uing strong and profitable growth in both divisions in a strategically and operationally focused way.’

‘Even after making the largest acquisition so far and despite the effect of a negative exchange rate, we achieved our sales revenue and profit targets adjusted in October 2007 and increased our operating profitability.’

In pro forma terms (that is, taking into account Stedim and the sale of the hydrodynamic bearings business) consolidated sales revenue was �622.7 million – up 3.3% from the pro forma figure of �602.6 million posted for 2006. This marks a new level, reports the company. On the basis of constant currencies, the increase in sales revenue was 5.9%. Pro forma underlying earnings before interest, taxes and amortisation (EBITA) totalled �71.1 million – up from �67.2 million a year earlier.

Looking at the regions on a pro forma basis, the company achieved the highest growth rates in Asia at a currency-adjusted 10.5%. Growth in Europe was also at a good level, attaining a currency-adjusted rate of 5.8%. Development in North America was more restrained. This is primarily attributed to weaker demand during the second-half of the year from a number of key customers for the Biotechnology Division caused by delayed or restricted approval of medications.

The Biotechnology Division posted cur-rency-adjusted growth in sales revenue of 5.6%, reaching a total of �375.9 million. Pro forma underlying EBITA was �49.7 million, up from �46.1 million a year earlier. The Mechatronics Division attained a pro forma underlying EBITA of �21.3 million, compared with �21.1 million in 2006, with currency-adjusted sales revenue up 6.4% at �246.8 million.

For fiscal 2008, the group is targeting an increase in sales revenue by more than 9% in

constant currencies, relative to the pro forma sales revenue posted for fiscal 2007. Sartorius says that in this context it expects that its businesses in dis-posables and industrial weighing equipment will generate the strongest growth momentum. Basing this sales forecast on an average US$/� exchange rate of 1.40, it anticipates that the group EBITA margin will rise to about 12%.

Contact:

Sartorius Corporate Administration GmbH, 37070

Goettingen, Germany. Tel: +49 551 308 33244,

www.sartorius.com

PolyFuel, a step closer to working prototype

PolyFuel of Mountain View, California, USA, reports that it has

now completed the penultimate stage of is multi-year development plan that aims to commercialise power supplies, based on fuel cells, for notebook PCs.

The end point of its five-step ‘road map’ is a working prototype designed to be integrated with a representative notebook PC, and which surpasses the performance of today’s lithium-ion batteries in terms of run-time versus size and weight. The underlying technology then would be made available to the firm’s customers and partners as a reference design.

According to PolyFuel, it has fundamentally solved the water management problem that has plagued portable fuel cell developers for nearly a decade. All fuel cells create water as a by-product of the electricity-generating process. The trick is what to do with it.

The company engineered an entirely new membrane electrode assembly (MEA) design, and a new system design that not only reduces the amount of water by-product (while the fuel is operating), but recycles a significant portion of that water directly back through the membrane to the fuel side, where it is reused to generate more electricity.

This approach allows the water to be kept in perfect balance throughout the system. The result is a considerable simplification in the design of the fuel cell system – eliminating com-ponents, reducing overall size and weight, and lowering cost. This is significant, as the primary difficulty with fuel cells has been to make them small enough to be integrated into the notebook personal computer itself.

PolyFuel has now met the first four stages of its development plan. In particular, multiple ‘proof of concept’ fuel cells incorporating the membrane, MEA and other newly-engineered system com-ponents have been running for hundreds of hours

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under the firm’s dramatically simplified system design and target operating conditions.

In consumer-oriented portable fuel cells, the laptop power supply would use ‘hot-swappable’ fuel cartridges that are easily and safely carried in a pocket or purse. These could effectively provide continuous power all day and all night if neces-sary. PolyFuel’s ultimate programme goal is to create such a power supply – a unit that is no larger than a lithium-ion battery pack, and offers the same run-time using one cartridge of fuel, but also at perhaps one-half the weight, a welcome improvement in portability for mobile consumers.

PolyFuel was spun out of SRI International (for-merly the Stanford Research Institute) during 1999, after 14 years of applied membrane research.

(Also see ‘Membranes push boundary of power density for DMFC stacks’, published in Membrane Technology November 2007, page 8.)

Contact:

PolyFuel, 1245 Terra Bella Avenue, Mountain View, CA

94043, USA. Tel: +1 650 429 4700, www.polyfuel.com

Veolia Water wins water-treatment contracts in Dubai

Veolia Water has won two water-treatment contracts in Dubai,

through its subsidiary Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies (VWS).

Worth a total of �22.4 million the contracts have been awarded for two prestigious sites – Palm Jumeirah Island and the Burj Dubai Tower. VWS will use its own patented tech-nologies to treat and recycle wastewater.

The first contract, awarded by Palm Water, a subsidiary of Nakheel, a real-estate development company that is part of the Dubai World Group, covers the delivery of a system for recycling waste-water on Palm Jumeirah, one of three artificial islands created in the Persian Gulf that will double the shoreline of the city of Dubai.

To guarantee that the water has the highest quality, VWS is using Biosep membrane filtration technology. The recycling facility, located along-side the existing wastewater treatment plant, will on its own have a treatment capacity of 17 000 m3 (about 4.5 million gallons) a day. The contract is worth �12.1 million for the company.

The artificial island, in the shape of a date palm, is an economic and luxury tourist centre, accom-modating hotels, houses, shopping malls and leisure facilities. A large volume of wastewater generated by its booming tourist activity will be recycled for irrigation and landscaping.

The second contract involves treating the water in an artificial lake bordering the Burj Dubai Tower,

which will be one of the highest in the world when it is completed. It has been awarded by property developer Emaar Properties, one of the largest groups in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Burj Dubai is part of a gigantic complex with an area totalling 26 million m2. It will include resi-dential, commercial and hotel infrastructure, leisure and entertainment facilities, and a 300 000-m3 (79.25-million-gallon) artificial lake. The contract, which is worth �10.3 million, includes a system for treating the water in the lake during spring 2009, and management of the plant for a period of three years. The lake will be fed by storm water that has already been treated and topped up with fresh water to offset evaporation. The lake water will be treated in closed circuit on a three-day cycle.

The treatment plant, with a capacity of 62 400 m3 (16.5 million gallons) a day, houses the storm-water treatment facility and recycling equipment. It will use four Actiflo modules, four Hydrotech disc filters, an Actidyne reverse osmosis (RO) membrane treatment module, and a post-treatment water re-mineralisation and sludge-treatment module.

Veolia Water was recently selected to run the operations and maintenance part of a RO desalina-tion plant of the F2 Independent Water and Power Project (F2 IWPP) in Qidfa, Fujairah in the UAE. This contract covers a period of 12 years, starting in the summer of 2010, and is in addition to a pre-operational period lasting three years. The plant will produce 136 500 m3 (36 million gallons) of desalinated water a day. The contract is worth an estimated cumulative total of �78 million.

Veolia Water says that this contract is a clear indication of the trust that it has built through the previously awarded contract in August 2007 by the F2 IWPP company for the construction of two new desalination plants (RO and multiple effect distillation) for a value of �596 million.

Contact:

Veolia Water, 52 rue d’Anjou, 75008 Paris Cedex 8,

France. Tel: +33 1 49 24 49 24,

www.veoliawater.com

Standards aim to improve quality of water services

A suite of standards has been intro-duced that offers the international

community practical tools to address the global challenge of effectively managing limited water resources in order to provide access to safe drinking water and sanitation for the world’s population.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published three standards providing

I n B r i e f

Rohm and Haas forms alliance with NovasepUS-based Rohm and Haas Company and Novasep, which is based near Nancy in France, are planning to form an exclusive alliance to market and sell technology for purifying crude glycerol by-product from bio-diesel processing. The technology, based on the combined per-formance of Rohm and Haas’ Ambersep BD50 resin and separation processes developed by Novasep, will be offered through the alliance partners and marketed by Rohm and Haas. The availability of crude glycerol has increased exponentially with the rapid growth in the bio-diesel industry. Rohm and Haas hopes that technology arising from the alliance will help to reduce costs for bio-diesel producers, glycerol refiners and processors. Rohm and Haas recently formed a joint-development agreement with US firm Millipore Corporation to create new high-performance chromatography products (see Membrane Technology February 2008, page 6).

Toro distributors offer Flowtronex technologyToro Company, a US provider of outdoor beau-tification products, says that its distributors will now offer pump stations from ITT Flowtronex when golf courses in North America purchase its irrigation products. The companies say they are joining forces to help golf courses more efficiently manage their water resources. In terms of water management, the benefits of this agreement will be far reaching. Flowtronex’s parent company ITT has a portfolio of water-related products and services, including reverse osmosis and UV treat-ment. As these technologies are combined with Flowtronex pump stations, customers will realise substantial benefits, say the firms.

Pacific Fuel Cell relocates MEA R&D to OhioUS-based speciality component manufacturer for the fuel cell industry Pacific Fuel Cell Corporation is relocating its membrane electrode assembly (MEA) research and development facility based in Riverside, California, to its plant in Willoughby, Ohio. ‘We are centralising our products at one facil-ity to take advantage of our existing manufacturing structure,’ said George Suzuki, Chief Executive Officer and President of Pacific Fuel Cell. ‘The relocation of our laboratory paves the way for the company to move from the research phase of nano MEA technology to the production phase.’

Wilfley Weber sold to Ashbrook In the USA, investment banking firm SDR Ventures Incorporated has sold Wilfley Weber Incorporated to environmental technologies business Ashbrook Simon-Hartley. Wilfley Weber, based in Denver, Colorado, designs and fabricates diffused aeration systems and components for the water and waste-water treatment industries. Ashbrook specialises in liquid and solid separation technologies and offers dewatering, process and fluid control systems.