Membrane tech to decarbonise heavy industry attracts $5.5m seed funding

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.