Impacts

Members of the Fluids Research Group founded the Salinity Solutions spin out company in 2021.

The company has developed and commercialized batch reverse osmosis (RO) technology, patented and developed at University of Birmingham. Reverse osmosis is used to separate water from solutes such as salts and pollutants. Though conventional reverse osmosis is an energy intensive process, batch RO reduces energy consumption by about 50%. Batch reverse osmosis is most advantageous when a high fraction of water needs to be recovered. The technology is being used to separate a range of pollutants from water, thus easing the environmental burden of wastewater disposal and making more clean water available.

One application is in phosphorous removal from wastewater. Phosphorous is a plant nutrient which causes algal blooms and eutrophication in rivers and lakes, harming wildlife. In some places, planning permission for housing developments is being held up, because environmental regulations concerning nutrients cannot be met. Working with Somerset Council and Wessex Water, Salinity Solutions trialled its technology to show that batch reverse osmosis can remove phosphorous to safe levels for discharge into rivers. The results showed that the technology can be deployed rapidly, with operation achieved within 24 hours of the delivery of the batch reverse osmosis unit on site. The unit removed about 98% of phosphorous. Eleven such units would suffice to cover the total development or phosphate mitigation obligations in Somerset. Salinity Solutions’ approach minimises the use of chemicals such as ferric chloride, which have traditionally been used to remove phosphorous.

Batch reverse osmosis can also recover valuable resources from water. One example is lithium which is experiencing soaring demand to supply battery and electric vehicle markets worldwide. The technology attracted the attention of Sociedad Química Minera (SQM) – Chile’s top lithium producer. As a result, the corporate venture capital arm of SQM recently invested £1.2M in Salinity Solutions which, together with University of Birmingham, is investigating the feasibility of using batch reverse osmosis to recover lithium from salt lake brine. SQM is aiming to trial the batch RO technology at the Salar Atacama in Chile.

Tim Naughton

CTO, Salinity Solutions Ltd

“Underpinning research carried out at University of Birmingham has been invaluable in guiding our product development which is rapidly accelerating in response to customer needs across mining, food and beverage, automotive, and wastewater treatment sectors”

Members of the Fluids Research Group have been leading the development of cutting-edge computational methods, including a high-performance open-source model known as SynxFlow, to simulate natural hazards such as floods and debris flows at scale. This work is underpinning other projects where this model is being used to support services or inform policies at national/regional scales. By harnessing latest GPU-based supercomputing and advanced computational algorithms, they created a robust system capable of delivering real-time high-fidelity flood forecasts. In the Met-Office funded Flood Hazard Impact Model for India project, they are integrating the model into India’s national flood forecasting services. In the UKRI funded £2M WM-Adapt project, the model is being used for generating high-resolution and locally relevant flood maps to inform climate adaptation policies for the West Midlands Combined Authority, which will then provide a replicable framework to be adopted UK-wide. Recently they have also expanded the model’s scope to climate risk for buried infrastructure systems in the STORMS project funded by UKRI. As part of a team, Dr Xilin Xia of University of Birmingham was awarded the prestigious Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water in 2024 for his contribution to developing high-performance flood models.