User:Thomas Hardiman/sandbox/LAT Water

= LAT Water = LAT Water Ltd is a British water technology company founded in 2015 and is based in Thatcham, Berkshire. It has developed a patented process for desalination and treating heavily contaminated water. Commercial sales commenced in 2018, with the first sale into China and in early 2019. LAT Water received an investment of £5 million investment from the Earthworm Group to support its expansion plans.

History
The company was founded in 2015 and changed its name to LAT Water in 2018 to align its name with the process - Low temperature Ambient pressure Technology. The process of water separation uses renewable energy or low grade waste heat achieving low cost water separation. In 2018 the company received an award from Innovate UK in the Shanghai UK Industrial Challenge leading to its first commercial order from China in the following year. In 2018 LAT Water received a £548,000 award in the Industrial Energy Efficiency Accelerator from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy as part of a £946,000 project to build a landfill leachate treatment plant for Viridor Waste Management Ltd. In 2019 LAT Water received a financial investment from the Earthworm Group to assist in its commercial expansion.

Technology
The patented process works by using renewable energy or waste heat from a source, such as generator coolant or power station cooling water, to heat up the contaminated water to below the boiling point of water. The heated concentrate is then pumped into an evaporation tower in which there is partial evaporation and the evaporated water vapor transferred to a second condensing tower where the heat of condensation is recovered and re-used within the process. The produced water in the condensing tower is pure distilled water.

The technology can handle a wide range of water contaminants with an input TDS (Total dissolved Solids) of up to 100,000 parts per million, producing an output feed of fresh water containing less then 20 TDS. The process boasts an ability to recover 90% of the water with further research on the way in creating a system that can facilitate a Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD), further opening opportunities in the recovery of salts and minerals from the contaminated water.

Commercially the process offers an overall lower operating cost from conventional methods such as Multi Stage Flash (MSF) or Reverse Osmosis (RO).

Future Developments
LAT Water has been exploring options of using high efficiency photovoltaic panels as an additional energy source for locations that do not have an abundance of waste heat to use, though it has not yet been indicated when this option will be available for customers.

Viridor Broadpath
In 2018 LAT Water was awarded a contract by landfill operator Viridor to install a plant capable of treating up to 15m³ a day of leachate at Viridor’s Broadpath Landfill near Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom. The waste heat source will be provided by the onsite flue gas from the bio-generators.

The plant is scheduled to open in the course of 2020 and will have a target of 80% water recovery, reducing the cost of transporting the leachate to treatment facilities. LAT water claims it will be able to reduce the costs of leachate treatment by over 50%.

Welle Group, Shenyang, China
In early 2019 LAT Water started construction on a waste water treatment plant in Northern China, near the city of Shenyang. Currently the site has an existing reverse osmosis plant that produces reject with 80,000 TDS. The LAT plant is capable of handling the RO reject and will process a total of 120m³ per day with a target water recovery of 80%. The plant is made up of two units each capable of handling 60m³ of leachate.

The plant was set to become fully operational in early 2020, but due to the Covid-19 pandemic the opening of the plant has been pushed to later on during the year.