NEWater Production Process

The NEWater Factory uses Microfiltration, Reverse Osmosis and Ultra-violet light disinfection technologies in a simple three-stage treatment process to treat effluent into NEWater.

The first process is called Microfiltration (MF). In MF, the treated used water is passed through fibres that work as microscopic filters. Each fibre can filter out particles up to 0.2 microns in size. MF sees to the filtering out of suspended solids and most colloidal particles, lowering turbidity of the effluent from a value of 3-6 NTU to <0.1 NTU, ensuring a consistently good quality feed water to prevent clogging in the Reverse Osmosis membrane. It also removes bacteria and protozoa.

This is the next process where the MF filtrate (feed) undergoes Reverse Osmosis (RO). RO involves applying pressure for water to flow from the concentrated side to the less concentrated side through a semi- permeable membrane to remove inorganics like heavy metals, nitrate, chloride, sulphate etc, and organics such as disinfection by-products, aromatic hydrocarbons, pesticides etc present in the microfiltration filtrate. The RO membrane has a pore size of 0.0001 microns and through this process, 95 percent of Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) can be removed. The RO membrane also removes viruses.

Ultra-violet disinfection is a safety back-up to remove any bacteria or viruses should the RO membrane be compromised and the viruses and bacteria go through the RO process.