A challenge for heavy industries is to create energy efficiencies in their legacy, highly energy-intensive assets. In chemical plants a major energy drain is the chain of separation and purification steps as it depends on highly energy-intensive thermal processes.
UniSieve said its membrane-based separation solutions can separate chemicals, energy carriers, or CO2 from flue gas based on size exclusion. The solution is said to bypass the need for heating or cooling through sieving membranes that can reduce the energy needed for separating and purifying molecules by up to 90 per cent.
In a statement, Samuel Hess, co-founder and CEO of UniSieve said: “In essence we say stop boiling and start sieving to end energy intensive distillation. The concept of sieving works as simple as a coffee filter holding back the coffee powder from an espresso. However, it gets a little tricky when separating chemicals that vary in size by a fraction of an angstrom. To do so, the sieve must be extremely narrow and precise. The UniSieve membrane is a structure made of a highly ordered network of porous crystals that generate in a repeating pattern.
“The concept of combining molecular sieves with a support layer to create the perfect membrane has been out there for decades but never made it into broad, commercially applicable membranes. When creating the membrane platform technology, the UniSieve Team focussed on economic scalability, the most frequent reason that has prevented other approaches from succeeding.”
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UniSieve was established in 2018 by university class mates Samuel Hess and Elia Schneider. Whilst studying at ETH Zürich, they discovered the means to manufacture and integrate porous crystals (zeolitic materials) into polymeric membranes. Pre-seed funding from Wingman Ventures and grants from the European Union, the Swiss government, and private foundations enabled them to prove the hypothesis of their scalable and affordable high-performing membranes.
“We have run pilot testing with industry leaders which have demonstrated that the separation solution works,” said Hess. “Today, we have several contracts signed and under negotiation to pilot our membranes in a variety of applications.”
This funding round saw participation from a venture capital consortium including the Amadeus APEX Technology Fund, Wingman Ventures, Ciech Ventures and Zürcher Kantonalbank.
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