Water Pipelines and the ADB Asia Water Forum 2018
Dr. Vinod Veedu at the ABD Water Forum in October, 2018
The 2018 Asia Water Forum was held from October 2-5 at the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) headquarters in Manila, Philippines. This year’s conference was focused on themes of “Information, Innovation, and Technology”, and was attended by Oceanit’s Sterling Yee, Director of Strategic Consulting, and Vinod Veedu, Director of Strategic Initiatives.
The Asia Water Forum (AWF) is a biennial conference that addresses the region’s growing water needs in an effort to prepare for or avert water crises in the future. At the conference, Dr. Vinod Veedu delivered a presentation titled, “Functional Surfaces for Highly Efficient, Low Carbon, Low Cost Desalination” which focused on how nanocomposite surfaces can greatly increase the efficiency of desalination processes. Current desalination efforts are typically high-cost in that they consume a lot of energy in order to desalinate saline water. This high energy cost of course correlates to higher carbon emissions from the amount of energy that must be consumed.
Functional nanocomposite technologies, such as Oceanit’s HeatX and DragX, have shown that by mitigating issues like corrosion, fouling, and surface roughness functional surface treatments can deliver a huge efficiency increase to industrial processes. Dr. Veedu also joined a panel to discuss innovation in water production and diversification of resources. He shared Oceanit’s S&T vision of developing transdisciplinary solutions to impactful problems, break through, and transition – delivering a better future. Oceanit successfully completed three applications of DragX to water pipelines in 2018 and are now working to expand that work on several major water diversion projects around the world in 2019.