Purifying Water

Water purification involves removing contaminants to make water potable, using technologies like membrane filtration and reverse osmosis, tailored according to needs and available water sources, such as surface water, well water, or even industrial effluents.

Advantages of Aclaira Treatment Solutions

Membrane technologies used by Aclaira (membrane filtration, nanofiltration and reverse osmosis) are now a must for large capacity treatment plants. They offer many advantages: absolute barrier against contaminants, ease of operation and reliability.

Aclaira brings together all these benefits in optimized solutions, perfectly designed for small communities:

  • Modularity of the units
  • Use of rugged and cost effective equipment, easily available and affordable in Africa
  • Manual cleaning of the membranes

Various kinds of treatments can be performed to purify water and make it drinkable. Selecting the treatment of choice depends mainly upon:

  • Water quantity required by the community
  • Type of raw water available
Eau non traitée

There are four broad families of raw water (before treatment):

  • Surface water: Rivers, lakes, shallow wells and springs under the “influence” of the surface. Such water is often contaminated with microbes. Two types of treatment are relevant to purify surface water: the so said conventional treatment and membrane filtration (microfiltration, ultrafiltration)
  • Borehole Water: such water can be contaminated with toxic chemicals such as Arsenic, Fluoride, Nitrates or even excess of sodium chloride (“salt”) which can be unhealthy when consumed excessively. “Conventional” treatment does not exist for chemical contaminants. In such cases one then relies on low pressure reverse osmosis or nanofiltration.
  • Municipal and Industrial Waste Water: such water must be treated prior to discharge in the environment otherwise it will severely contaminate natural water sources. A biological treatment plant can reduce Biological and Chemical Oxygen Demand (BOD and COD).
    The treatment of secondary effluents is more and more cost effective in order to address lack of water in large cities or “megacities”.
  • Sea water: purifying sea water is expensive, typically €2.5-€4 per cubic meter, because treating it requires much energy. It is a last resort solution when no surface, borehole or effluent water is available.