A breath of fresh air: How water purification optimizes your humidifier systems

For some, it is just air; for others, a humidifier system is essential to their business. Some need a humidifier to keep their respiratory system in check, and others need it during production. Aquaporin has partnered with Condair A/S in Denmark, which supplies humidification systems for various applications within industry, buildings, hospitality, food and beverage, and human health. Condair has more than 700 employees worldwide and is headquartered in Switzerland. 

The proper and consistent humidity level at manufacturing sites is paramount to securing a high level of product quality but also to maintaining existing indoor building structures and facilities. Therefore, Condair tailor-made its systems to suit each site’s conditions to create the optimal environment to protect and preserve the site’s assets. To ensure the longevity of the humidification system, the feedwater is purified by reverse osmosis.

Aquaporin is helping Condair by providing Aquaporin Inside® reverse osmosis membranes that strikes the right balance between water flow rate and permeate quality for the purification process.

Meeting the Condair standards

The Swiss company has very high quality requirements, and after our initial meetings with Condair, it pointed towards the Aquaporin Inside® CLEAR series, where the membranes can deliver high throughput while meeting the client’s permeate quality requirements.

Condair has extensively tested the Aquaporin Inside® CLEAR Ultra 4040 membranes, including benchmarking against conventional BWRO membranes. 

Under the same temperature conditions and feed pressure, the results showed an improved permeate flow rate by 12.2% while maintaining the permeate quality, compared to the conventional BWRO membranes. The high flow rate allows Condair to design systems with larger capacity with the same footprint and in some cases even reduce the footprint, allowing system installations in locations with limited space.

More importantly, CLEAR Ultra membranes have fulfilled Condair’s requirements for hardness removal from the feedwater. The CLEAR Ultra 4040 membrane meet Condair’s requirements with a salt rejection rate of 98.4% and a flow rate of 404 L/h.

Lasse Andresen, Product Manager at Condair, is happy about the entire process:

We are pleased with the cooperation with Aquaporin, which has worked flawlessly throughout the entire process. At the same time, Aquaporin delivers a product that meets our quality requirements.”

Lasse Andresen, Product Manager, Condair

The successful product assessment has resulted in a collaboration where Condair uses a range of Aquaporin Inside® CLEAR membranes in their humidifier systems and enters a development project with a new product in mind. 

Why did the companies match?

The Aquaporin Inside® CLEAR membranes are developed with industry users in mind and provide the best-in-class permeate flow rate. For Condair, a higher flow rate on smaller systems was essential, and Aquaporin helped achieve that. An increased capacity of Condair’s standard system without a change in feed pressure could result in shorter system operating times, thus saving energy. One of the key parameters for success was also an excellent rejection of contaminants, and Aquaporin managed to deliver the high-quality permeate that Condair expected.

On top of the technical benefits that Aquaporin provides, the short lead time of Aquaporin products suited Condair well, as well as in-time technical support.