An NJIT Engineering Team Wins an Edison Patent Award for Sustainability
A team of NJIT engineers won a Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award in the sustainability category from the Research & Development Council of New Jersey for a resilient water treatment system that can run on waste heat or low-grade energy.
The team was among 60 honorees at the Council’s virtual awards ceremony Friday night, themed “Transforming Hope into Action.”
Their system distills dirty or ocean water in a chamber that separates pure water from particles, such as salts or metals, through evaporation. It requires neither filters nor membranes, which degrade over time and need regular replacement. The entire system operates at low temperatures and low pressure on low-grade energy, such as any renewable energy, or residual energy from industrial processes that otherwise would be wasted as heat.
“As population and economic growth drive demand for energy and clean water, we need to find efficient and economical treatment methods,” said Mengchu Zhou, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering and member of the team, who noted that most industrial distillation plants rely on energy derived from fossil fuels.
The NJIT technology incorporates a new vacuum generation mechanism that helps accelerate the process of converting the heated incoming liquid to steam via water evaporation.
“There are many applications in water-intensive industries for this efficient technology, including the manufacture of pharmaceutical drugs, water desalination and the treatment of wastewater in agricultural ponds before it is returned to the environment,” Zhou said, adding, “Fracking operators now truck all of their dirty water to manmade lakes and it is very costly.”
Other members of the team include inventors in NJIT’s Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, including Chao Zhu and Zhiming "Jimmy" Ji, who are both professors, Guangyu "Tony" Guo, a current Ph.D. student and Bo Zhang, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the program.
Guo, who built prototypes of single and two-stage vacuum distillation systems, is currently optimizing the current design for use in large-scale commercial applications.
Zhou is also working with Professors Zhu and Ji on technology that would use inexpensive, highly-scalable heat sources to power potentially huge vacuum generators. Applications include water treatment facilities at hydraulic fracturing sites and tunnels for extremely high-speed trains.
In other areas related to efficiency, he is exploring methods to realize net zero energy data centers, which require vast amounts of electricity to run their systems and to cool them, by accurately predicting the timing of tasks and scheduling them optimally to computing servers.
“Today the entire world is standing by with the hope that the acts of the research community will result in the development of an effective vaccine that will combat the largest health crisis our generation has ever seen,” Council Chairman Kevin Campos, who heads small molecule process research and development at Merck & Co., wrote in the program’s opening letter. “This hope is fueling the research community’s work, reinforcing the importance of science, data, and discovery, and empowering researchers to truly live out our theme of ‘Transforming Hope into Action.’”