FO-based treatment processes have direct relevance to NASA's efforts to create technologies for long-term sustainability in space missions, specifically for treating grey water and even black water generated by the crew during space flight. Moreover, NASA's Sustainability Base program incorporates the forward-osmosis based greywater recycling effort (run by Dr. M. Flynn at ARC) that would benefit directly and immediately from the results of this project. FO-based water treatment could have important applications in the marketplace. Currently, there is an enormous unfilled need (more than 2 Billion gallons/year) in the produced water market from oil and gas drilling, and FO could fill that niche with a simple, economical, and sustainable solution. Other industrial applications of FO range from food and beverage industry use to auxiliary power generation from Pressure-retarded osmosis processes.
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