Ten partners strive towards a sustainable approach of the industrial process water chain.

They are doing this by developing new water treatment configurations tailared to the specific industrial processes. As such, water of different qualities can be transformed to process water of the desired quality. Using the mobile IMPROVED installation, not only the entire treatment trajectory of pretreatment and desalting can be simulated, also the influence of the obtained water quality on the efficiency of steam making, corrosion and pollution of cooling towers can be simulated without having to interfere in the real process.

The aim of IMPROVED is to construct and test an easily movable research installation to be tested at different industrial sites with significant water use, these include Dow, Yara and BASF.

Up till now, process water is very often made from ground water or surface water. IMPROVED will investigate whether also other water sources such as brackish water and wastewater can be transformed in process water of the right quality. In case of success, the water cycle will be closed better and the industrial freshwater demand can be significantly decreased.

The entire project will take 3 years. In the first year, the mobile installation is designed and built. In the following years, different waters will be treated using different technologies by using the installation on location.