ABOUT CONWED

WHO WE ARE
Conwed is the leading plastic netting manufacturer in the world.
Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Conwed has five manufacturing locations on
two continents and a global distribution network. We have more than 45 years of
FEED SPACER DEVELOPMENT
experience developing netting solutions to help our customers improve their products in a
wide range of industries. IN RO FILTRATION
WHAT WE DO
Among our core products and technologies we manufacture
extruded, oriented and knitted netting with unique customization
capabilities.
Our engineering and R&D teams solve product development challenges for our customers
and we specialize in customizing our netting products to meet strict specifications and
performance targets.

HOW WE DO IT
We focus on business development opportunities and work closely
with our customers from concept to commercialization.
We understand the importance of exploring, analyzing and testing components and
materials during our customers' product development processes, so we tailor our products
to meet their performance requirements and uncover potential innovation through
ongoing testing and experimentation.

GLOBAL HEADQUARTERS EUROPEAN HEADQUARTERS

2810 WEEKS AVE SE MARCEL HABETSLAAN 20
MINNEAPOLIS, MN 55414 3600 GENK, BELGIUM
TEL 800.426.0149 FAX 612.623.2500 TEL +32.89.848310
www.conwedplastics.com FAX +32.89.848320
Feed Spacer Development in RO Filtration
It plays a vital role, if a small one, in reverse osmosis (RO)
water treatment, and that role is easily overlooked. Even
its roots are humble: the first iterations were nearly
identical to mesh bags that hold apples and oranges at the
grocery store. But the feed spacer, long considered a
simple commodity, just part of an RO element, appears to
offer vast potential for innovation and research that could
drive advances in RO water production.
REVERSE OSMOSIS
Reverse osmosis is a critical part of the world's water
supply. The International Water Management Institute, a
non-profit scientific research organization that focuses on
sustainable water use in developing countries, estimates
that by 2025 nearly 1 billion people will lack access to fresh,
drinkable water ¹. It's clear that RO will play a major role in
alleviating water scarcity, but there will be a strong push
for greater efficiency and cutting energy costs while
boosting product water output.
For most RO plants, the key word is energy. An RO plant
typically needs at least 150 psi and can require as much as
1000 psi to efficiently operate its RO arrays. Pressure at
those levels consumes a large amount of power. The
change in pressure from feed water inlet to concentrate
outlet is known as pressure drop. Pressure drop is a key
measurement of the energy efficiency of an RO plant.
Maintaining pressure, or having a low pressure drop, is
often a vital concern for some RO plants. It is also
expensive: high pressure is costly to achieve and maintain.
Plants have different sources and prices for power, of
course, but the overall cost for energy is trending up.
Given the tremendous volume of water processed by RO
plants as well as the extremely high energy costs, even
small improvements in efficiency can translate into large
savings or increased product water output. A great deal of
research and innovation pursuing these goals has focused
on membrane chemistry, including changes to the
polymeric formulation and different methods of membrane
production.
Conwed believes that the next leaps in RO filtration
efficiency could come from the feed spacer. The simple
plastic netting doesn't have to be so simple anymore, and
Conwed has launched a large-scale R&D project to
innovate the next generation of feed spacers.
INNOVATION IN THE FEED SPACER
The Global Innovation and Technology team at Conwed,
led by James Kidwell, is devising and testing new ideas and
developments in feed spacers. “Conwed has been
developing netting solutions for more than 45 years”, says
Kidwell. “Our aim here is to research the RO challenges
prevalent in our industry and test new feed spacer ideas
that might help address those challenges.”
Conwed began this investigation with a thorough review of
academic literature. As Kidwell reviewed the research
being conducted at universities around the world, it
became clear that the people who studied RO filtration as
much as anyone think there is potential in the feed spacer
to address some of the industry's most pressing issues.
“That's often where new developments come from in any
industry,” says Kidwell. “Ideas start in academia and then
bubble over into the commercial realm.”
Kidwell then spent 18 months traveling the globe,
searching not for answers but for problems. He visited the
major players in the RO membrane industry, surveying
them to identify their biggest operational challenges.
Conwed typically sells its feed spacers to companies that
manufacture RO elements. Their manufacturing process is
generally known as spiral winding for the way membrane,
feed spacer, and permeate spacer are wound tightly into an
element, through which water is pushed and filtered.
But Conwed didn't stop with just its own customers.
Kidwell also visited his customers' customers: the RO
plants that use the elements as well as the industrial
construction companies that build RO plants and design
and install RO systems. Kidwell's approach was simple: he
began the effort with no assumptions of his own, a clean
slate, and asked some of his company's customers as well
as those customers' customers, “What are your areas of
greatest need? What causes you the most problems?” Their
answers laid out the direction of the Innovation Team's
research.
RO CHALLENGES
There were three primary problems that resonated among
the companies Kidwell talked to. These three problems
came up repeatedly and at times overlapped as a concern
for both the membrane manufacturers and the RO plant
operators and builders. They were:
I. Pressure drop
II. Membrane damage
III. Biofouling and scaling
With their research targets thus identified, the Global
Innovation and Technology team at Conwed set out to
design different feed spacers and test the impact that
changing individual features could have on each of these
problems. But the experiments required wide-open
thinking as well as creativity. Conwed invested a
substantial amount of time and dedicated R&D personnel
to develop and test feed spacer designs. Says Kidwell, “Our
team can work on a specific idea and control selected steps
of the process, so that what I want to test is completely
isolated and examined.”
I. Pressure Drop
As noted earlier, high pressures necessary for RO require
commensurate levels of energy. Any increase in pressure
drop represents a loss in pressure and hence a loss of
efficiency—and of course energy, and money.
Any reduction in pressure drop represents savings to the
plant. Ideally, pressure in an RO plant comes as much as
possible from high feed stream throughput, and not from
overcoming feed spacer resistance. But a feed spacer with
no resistance isn't the answer either, because RO elements
require turbulence in the feed stream to work efficiently.
That turbulence comes mostly from the water rushing
across and through the feed spacer, and is important
because it reduces salt buildup on the membrane.
To address the challenge of pressure drop, researchers at
Conwed are experimenting with feed spacer configurations
for optimum flow and lowest intrinsic resistance while still
trying to maintain a sufficient degree of turbulence. Spacer
configurations are created and tested to measure pressure
drop across the feed spacer.
While more testing remains to be done, Conwed believes
the feed spacer may have a role to play in reducing
pressure drop. As Conwed continues to examine different
alternatives, the nature and scope of the impact the feed
spacer has should become more evident.
 II. Membrane Damage
When RO membrane manufacturers roll their elements,
they wind layers of membrane, feed spacer, and permeate
spacer tightly into the cylindrical element so recognizable
in the RO industry. The membranes themselves are
susceptible to damage during the manufacturing process as
they are tightly pressed against the feed spacer. As with
many aspects of the RO process, winding the membranes
and feed spacers involves tradeoffs.
The feed spacers need a high degree of dimensional
stability to maintain separation between the membranes.
However, the stiffer the feed spacer, the more likely it is to
damage the membrane. A softer feed spacer, for instance
one made from resins other than polypropylene, is gentler
on the membrane—but that in turn compromises some of
the stiffness and stability.
Filter elements undergo extensive quality control checks
before being shipped, including testing flux and rejection
performance. Elements with membrane damage can't be
repaired—they are discarded, and accrue to the membrane
manufacturer's scrap rate, driving up costs. Some feed
spacer resins might offer breakthroughs in terms of the
tradeoff of structure and membrane damage. Ongoing
testing suggests there might be gains to be made in feed
spacer structure without causing membrane damage, but
there has to be an effective way to test them to predict
potential membrane damage.
As part of their research, the innovation team at Conwed is
testing different chemistry configurations and the impact
they may have on RO membranes. This connects directly to
their research concerning the effect different spacer
configurations have on pressure drop; because unorthodox
or novel feed spacers that may offer gains in pressure drop
aren't viable if they cause excessive membrane damage.
1. http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/About_IWMI/Strategic_Documents/Annual_Reports/1998/WSacarcity.pdf [sic]
2. Reid, Katherine, Mike Dixon, Con Pelekani, Karyn Jarvis, Mason Willis, Yang Yu; “Biofouling control by hydrophilic surface modification of polypropylene feed spacers by
plasma polymerisation,” Desalination 335 (2014) 108–118.
3. Vrouwenvelder, Hans. Biofouling of Spiral Wound Membrane Systems; PhD thesis Delft University of Technology; Delft, The Netherlands, 2009.
4. J.S. Vrouwenvelder, D.A. Graf von der Schulenburg, J.C. Kruithof, M.L. Johns, M.C.M. van Loosdrecht, Biofouling of spiral-wound nanofiltration and reverse osmosis membranes:
a feed spacer problem, Water Res. 43 (2009) 583–594.
“Right now there's not really a standard way to test
membrane damage without winding an element,” says
Kidwell. Conwed is attempting to measure and predict the
effect different feed spacers would have on membranes in
the winding process. “We wanted to do this screening
ourselves to understand potential improvement on our
feed spacers” notes Kidwell. “That way the pressure—
pardon the pun—wouldn’t be on our customers to explore
new ways to do this.” The ultimate goal is to develop even
BEFORE YOU ASSUME
higher quality feed spacers, with the potential impact on
membranes tested, measured, and documented.
IT CAN’T BE DONE,
III. Biofouling
CHALLENGE US
Biofouling occurs when unwanted microorganisms and
algae grow on the feed spacer or membrane surfaces. This
happens in any RO filtration system, but it causes two main
problems for RO plants. First, the fouling material clogs
the membrane and the feed spacer, leaving less of the
membrane surface area permeable and increases flow
resistance. This leads to higher pressure drop, so the RO
plant has to pump water at a higher pressure to overcome
resistance. Second, biofouling also impairs the quality of
the permeate water². To address these problems, the RO
plant has to clean the elements, which can cause
operational delays or even total shutdown of different
stages in an array. All of these factors contribute to an
increase in water production costs.
In his PhD thesis Biofouling of Spiral Wound Membrane
Systems, Hans Vrouwenvelder demonstrated persuasively
that biofouling is primarily a feed spacer problem.³ Indeed,
other research has found higher concentrations of
biofouling where the membrane contacts the feed spacer
strands.⁴ With this in mind, Conwed is evaluating the
impact different feed spacer configurations may have on
biofouling. As with the experiments investigating pressure
drop and membrane damage, the biofouling experiments
suggest that further R&D is absolutely warranted.
SUMMARY
In an industry with such large-scale inputs of power, water,
and capital, small gains in operational efficiency can mean
big savings or increased output. Conwed is committed to
furthering RO feed spacer research, whether testing their
own hypotheses or offering testing services to other RO
industry organizations and academicians. “This is exciting
research,” says Kidwell. “At this point we are limited only
by our imagination and our ingenuity. We haven't hit our
limits yet.”