Forward Osmosis · Cooling Make-Up

Data Center

water systems

Trevi builds forward-osmosis systems that turn seawater, brackish groundwater, reclaimed streams, or the data center's own reject water into cooling make-up, driven by low-grade heat.

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Water is infrastructure

The Water Constraint on Data Center Siting

Cooling towers lose water to evaporation, and what stays behind concentrates dissolved solids. Operators manage blowdown, chemistry, and a constant make-up demand. Where freshwater is tight, that balance can decide permitting, operating cost, and community acceptance.

Climate, cooling architecture, source-water chemistry, discharge limits, and the site's heat profile set the design. Trevi starts there.

Candidate sources
Seawater · Brackish groundwater · Reclaimed water · Produced water
Thermal input
Suitable low-grade waste heat · Solar thermal · Other site heat · Data-center cooling-loop waste heat
Delivered stream
Cooling make-up water engineered to the site's specification
Concentrate path
Reuse · Further concentration · Managed discharge

Recovery, water quality, energy use, and economics come from source chemistry and a site heat balance.

Data center campus
Candidate integration point · rack heat, water treatment, and cooling make-up
One integrated water layer

Matching Water Source to On-Site Heat

Trevi's forward-osmosis loop pulls water across the membrane with an osmotic draw solution, then uses heat to separate product water and recycle the draw. The design question: can the site's heat, feedwater, cooling demand, and discharge strategy run as one dependable water system?

  1. 01

    Open the source map

    Evaluate non-potable supplies before assuming a new freshwater allocation.

  2. 02

    Design to the cooling system

    Set product-water chemistry to the site's tower, liquid-cooling, and treatment requirements.

  3. 03

    Account for the residual

    Decide how concentrate and cooling-tower blowdown will be reused, reduced, or managed.

Discuss the Integration
Design sequence · Source to cooling make-up

How the Water System Is Designed

A viable project aligns water chemistry, thermal integration, product specification, and residual management.

  1. 01

    Characterize

    We characterize hardness, alkalinity, silica, and microbiological indicators alongside the core panel. Cooling loops concentrate chemistry with every cycle, driving scale and biofilm risk.

  2. 02

    Integrate heat

    Map heat grade, duty cycle, redundancy, and exchanger approach before assigning recoverable heat to draw regeneration.

  3. 03

    Produce make-up water

    Use the FO loop to separate water from the source stream, then polish it to the cooling system's required specification.

  4. 04

    Return water and route concentrate

    Return product water to cooling make-up and define the concentrate or blowdown path against site discharge limits.

Trevi forward-osmosis plant at NELHA, Keahole Point, Hawaii
Platform reference · NELHA · Keahole Point, Hawaii

Field Evidence: NELHA, Hawaii

A public third-party report documents a 500 m³/day forward-osmosis seawater plant at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority, built with U.S. Department of Energy support. Low-grade heat drove seawater desalination at pilot scale.

500 m³/day
Documented plant capacity
Seawater feed
Open-ocean source at Keahole Point
DOE / NELHA
Agency supporting the pilot program

NELHA is a seawater plant, not a data-center deployment; data-center performance requires a site-specific pilot and design basis.

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Start with the site data

Bring the water balance and heat profile. We'll show what the site can recover.

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