We are very happy to welcome our new colleague, Advait Palakodeti. Advait holds a PhD in chemical engineering at KU Leuven. At HYDROHM, he will work as R&D engineer on resource recovery projects.

We are happy to team up with SEMiLLA Maritime Solutions in a new consortium to promote space technologies for wastewater recycling on earth. The European Space Agency has commissioned a mobile unit for demonstration of urine treatment and greywater recycling. We will finalize and deploy the unit next spring!

On December 13^th, we welcomed Christophe Lasseur, Head of the MELiSSA program of ESA and Marc Vallois from SEMiLLA Maritime Solutions in Nazareth.

Together with our manufacturing partner Spraying Systems Autojet Europe we have designed a compact and mobile URIDIS installation, an important step in our mission to enable safe and sustainable toilets. All hardware is integrated in one skid that can treat 25 L of urine (100 toilet visits) and produce 75 L of disinfecting flush water per day.

HYDROHM and Pureblue Water teamed up in a CrossRoads2 Sustainable Energy project to develop an electrochemical technology that enables cost-effective and energy-neutral decentralised water and sludge treatment. In this video, our project engineer Fabian De Wilde explains together with Alessandro di Biase from PureBlue Water our E-HYDRO technology.

On November 17th, we presented our Vlakwa Open Call 2020 project ‘ELECTRODIS’ at the Vlakwa Culinary innovation walk in Kortrijk. In the ELECTRODIS project, HYDROHM and EKOPAK developed and evaluated an innovative technology to replace the use of chemicals for the cleaning and protection of water treatment membranes, by on-site electrochemical upgrading of RO-concentrate, which is currently a waste stream.

More information can be found on the VLAKWA website.

On November 14th and 15th, we have presented the exciting topic of life support in space and how we developed the URIDIS technology for this at campus Sint Hendrik (Leiepoort) in Deinze to all students going from year 1 till 6. It was an exciting experience to reach hundreds of students and see their interest. The students had overall dozens of questions regarding the topic and their understanding of how URIDIS works has created a lot of visits to the toilets connected to our system besides awareness that also on earth, water is a very precious resource that we need to preserve.

The MELiSSA community organised its international conference in Toulouse with over 250 attendees. HYDROHM has presented the URIDIS technology as well as the activities in the SaRY project to this audience which has attracted considerable attention. It is clear that separate urine treatment will play an important role in future manned spaceflight, enabling not only water recovery but also nutrient recycling and production of disinfectants to be used on board without needing additional chemical inputs.

In September, we moved to our new office: Hauwenhauwstraat 2B, 9810 Nazareth, where we have plenty of space to construct and operate pilot skids to demonstrate our electrochemical technologies.

Read more about our URIDIS technology in the case study report on socio-economic benefits from ESA Technology Transfers, made by know.space for ESA.