CEVAP Technology | Unique evaporator, driven by low grade waste heat
There are many outstanding water treatment technologies available on the market nowadays, which can treat almost any types of waste water. Still, many industrial waste waters are not being treated, because treatment costs are too high. This results in harm to the environment and loss of water and reusable materials.
CEVAP Technology BV is a Dutch water technology supplier, located in Eindhoven. The startup consists of Hein Weijdema (CEO), Beatrice Marinello (Process Engineering) and Martijn Geelhoed (R&D Engineering). The startup offers an innovative evaporation-based water treatment technology to the industrial water treatment market.
Martijn Geelhoed | R&D Engineer
Water treatment costs are high, because the currently available technologies have high maintenance and energy demands, especially when waste waters are corrosive or cause strong scaling or fouling. Examples of these difficult waste waters are high salt-containing brines, runoff water from waste dump sites, or waste waters produced by the chemical industry.
The industrial water treatment market therefore needs a water treatment process that is low-cost and applicable to these challenging waste waters. CEVAP Technology identified this market demand in 2016 and started with its mission: develop a water treatment technology that is engineered for lowest cost-of-ownership, applicable to complex waste waters, allowing recovery of clean water and materials, thus lowering energy and waste footprints of the global industries.
Beatrice Marinello | Process Engineer
Hein Weijdema | CEO
“don´t hesitate to start looking for financing when your own technology development asks for it!”
This development process has resulted in the CEVAP evaporator, where CEVAP stands short for “Cartridge EVAPorator”. The idea is simple and effective: avoid corrosion issues by making the evaporator from plastics and deal with internal scaling and fouling by packing the internal structure of the evaporator into easy-replaceable cartridges.
In 2018 and 2019 CEVAP Technology tested its new evaporator technology with success in two challenging environments: a paper mill and a pig farm. The waste waters at these locations allowed the startup to “fail fast, learn fast”, showing quickly where the technology still needed adaptations. From there product development started, resulting in two types of CEVAP evaporators being available end 2020 as products: the C-100 and the C-1000.
In January 2021 CEVAP Technology achieved its very first sale of a C-100 evaporator, to the Cetaqua Water Research Centre in Barcelona, Spain. At the same time, CEVAP Technology is establishing partnerships with Dutch water treatment companies, to jointly bring the CEVAP evaporators to the Dutch and European market.
The very first sale brings a short-term challenge for CEVAP: get the evaporator to work as a reliable product at the customer site, while making sure it complies with all the necessary HSE-regulations. For the near future, the main challenge for CEVAP is to setup a solid supply line for the evaporators, including a complete quality assurance system and supply contracts that will guarantee sufficient margins so CEVAP can achieve break-even in the projected time.
CEVAP Technology used early-stage financing with Brabant Startup Fonds for the development of the concept, allowing for a swift and efficient development process, because the necessary materials, services and components could be acquired straight away. In this way a dangerous trap was avoided in technology development: staying too long in the “let´s do it cheap and experimental” mode. This mode is great and necessary for the very first proof-of-principles steps that a start-up takes, but at a certain point it becomes necessary to scale-up to professional parts.
Hein likes to share with future entrepreneurs: “Staying attached too long to the cost-saving mode will hinder the development of your technology, and might lead to expensive delays or false results, leading to taking wrong decisions and loss of traction. Therefore, don´t hesitate to start looking for financing when your own technology development asks for it!”
