TU Delft - Nanofiltration and Reverse Osmosis in Water Treatment | ONLINE COURSE

Meet the course team

• Bas Heijman: Associate Professor at the Department of Water Management, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology. After a few years of teaching at the School for horticulture in Nijmegen, in 1987 he began his PhD research at the Technical University in Eindhoven. His PhD thesis was about the stability of titanium dioxide pigments in water-based paints. In 1991, he started at Kiwa water Research in Nieuwegein, conducting research on beneficial application of drinking water sludge. Other research topics included adsorption on activated carbon, ion exchange, ultrafiltration and nanofiltration. His main research fields are membrane filtration and new treatment concepts for drinking water production. Degrees: PhD, Eindhoven University of Technology and MSc in Molecular Sciences, Wageningen University and Research Centre.
• Amir Haidari: Coordinator of Professional Design Engineering for the Sanitary Engineering Department, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft university of Technology. He graduated in 2011 at the Sanitary Engineering section of Delft University of Technology. Amir used a combination of ion exchange, reverse osmosis and Eutectic Freeze Crystallization (EFC) to achieve "Zero Liquid Discharges (ZLD)". Reverse Osmosis (RO) membrane is used to treat the groundwater and the produced concentrate from reverse osmosis is fed to EFC. EFC is applied as the last treatment step to eliminate the high concentrated brine into pure ice and pure salts. Since 2011, he started to work on another membrane-related study called "OSMF". The final aim of this project is to use the membranes as the only step for producing potable water. Degrees: MSc, Sanitary Engineering, Delft University of Technology.
• Begüm Tanis: is an assistant professor in the Department of Water Management at Delft University of Technology. Her research focuses on both the fundamentals and applications of membrane-based water treatment processes, including drinking water production, concentrate management, and the treatment of alternative water sources for drinking, industrial, and agricultural use. Begüm received her PhD in 2020 from the Singapore Membrane Technology Centre (SMTC), part of the Nanyang Environment and Water Research Institute (NEWRI) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. She continued working at the same institute as a research fellow until late 2021. Her work combined experimental and computational approaches to investigate membrane fouling mechanisms across a range of applications—from nanofiltration to microfiltration—targeting oily wastewater, industrial water (e.g., biocatalyst separation, pharmaceutical processes), complex streams involving organic solvent–water mixtures, and microplastics. Before joining TU Delft, Begüm worked at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) as a postdoctoral researcher, where she focused on forward osmosis and reverse osmosis processes, for applications such as ultrapure water production, osmotic cold concentration for pharmaceutical and food & beverage industries, and resource recovery. Her academic journey has been recognized with awards, including the Singapore International Graduate Award (SINGA) in 2015, the Women in Engineering, Science, and Technology (WiEST) Grant in 2021, and the Delft Technology Fellowship (DTF) in 2023.