NTU Start-Up Builds Remote-Operated Water Treatment Plant In Vietnam

An NTU start-up, De.Mem Pte Ltd, successfully launched its first overseas water treatment plant in Vietnam this month.

AsianScientist (May 20, 2013) – A Nanyang Technological University (NTU) start-up, De.Mem Pte Ltd, successfully launched its first overseas water treatment plant in Vietnam this month.

The remote-monitored, one-man operated plant is the first of its kind in Southeast Asia. Located at Duc Hoa, at Long An province near Ho Chi Minh City, the newly built plant is only about 120 square meters in size, but has an output of one million liters of drinking water daily, equivalent to 6,600 Singaporeans’ daily water consumption. The plant will be linked wirelessly via an NTU-designed network back to the Singapore office, which will oversee and manage its daily operations.

The new plant, which is a joint venture between De.Mem and Vietnam company GD Wasser, is backed by Singapore-based investment firm, New Asia Investments, which had invested S$300,000 into De.Mem.

De.Mem – short for Decentralised Membranes, will design, build and operate the water treatment plant. The start-up is a subsidiary and partner of MINT (Membrane Instruments & Technology), an NTU spin-off company supplying water quality sensor technologies for water treatment plants. It uses MINT’s patented membrane integrity sensor technologies developed at NTU’s Nanyang Environment and Water Research Institute (NEWRI) to monitor the plant’s performance.

“This model is a new form of de-centralised water treatment plants, where we can control the quality and operations of dozens of small water plants simultaneously while only needing very few skilled workers locally,” said Dr Adrian Yeo, who is the General Manager of both De.Mem and MINT.

Riding on the successful launch of this first plant, four more water treatment plants are being planned for Vietnam by the end of this year.

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Source: NTU.
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