Perhaps nothing has driven home the point of needing clean water to drink more thoroughly than the images and stories coming out of hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico. People having to resort to drinking contaminated and filthy water has resulted in mass cases of dehydration, disease and death. The world continues to look for ways to provide safe drinking water, and one of the mysteries we are still trying to solve is a way to make the ocean’s water potable for communities through desalination.

It is a tempting option. After all, most of the world is covered in non-potable water, and all that is standing between us and that resource is the cost of the desalination process. Billions of dollars have been spent on desalination plants only to discover that the energy required to run the plants costs far more than the value of the water being produced. Using too much energy in the process of trying to “save the world” by providing clean water is a bit of an irony, so the race is on to determine how best to go about desalination. Here is where Komax can help.

Komax provides products that can stand up to the harshness of the desalination process. For example, our Kynar and Teflon lined static mixers can take the abrasion from aggressive chemicals (or the wear and tear of salt). Our expertise in working with this issue goes back for many years. For example, we worked in the country of Singapore on a reverse-osmosis plant to accommodate as much as 10% of Singapore’s national water demand, which includes a pretreatment process, filtration process and other treatments to ensure consumption standards were of top quality.

The problem of desalination is a difficult one to solve – but with the right tools and expertise, it is one we can all tackle together.