BHEL ties up with IIT for water purification

Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) is all set to enhance its spending on R&D to enhance the efficiency of water purification processes
like reverse osmosis and thermal desalination technologies. This is to ensure that its power plants get a steady supply of water and that a portion of it can shared with residential communities in the neighbourhood of its units.

Currently, BHEL resorts to desalination of sea water and treating of brackish or sewage water to feed power plants. The R&D projects will be developed to cater to the needs of future power plants that are likely to be located away from rivers or water bodies. "Earlier, power plant used to be located near rivers or water bodies. In future, plants will located either close to coal mines or ports to minimise logistic cost. Also, availability of water will be difficult in coming years," said a BHEL official.

As part of the initiative, BHEL's Tiruchi and Ranipet units have entered into an industry-academia collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) to help foster research on new technologies that can make its power plants environment-friendly. Given the fact that all its units are currently coal-fired thermal power plants which emit vast amounts of carbon, the plan can also be interpreted as an effort to negate the adverse effects of global warming.

"IIT and BHEL will work on time-bound projects to identify future technologies for power plants. The number of projects is yet to be finalised," said BHEL Ranipet unit's executive director A V Krishnan, after signing the MoU at IIT-M on Wednesday. The joint research will focus more on sea water desalination and pollutant control system. Already, a ceramic membrane is being developed for reverse osmosis by IIT. Other areas of R&D collaboration will include super-critical steam generators, modelling and analysis, material characterisation, utilisation of nano materials, fuel cells and bio mass and zero emission technologies.

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