ACURIANT PUBLISHED IN GWI: THE REAL CONSTRAINT ON FAB WATER REUSE
Global Water Intelligence (GWI) has published a feature article by Dr. Christian Göbbert, Chief Technology Officer at Acuriant Technologies. The piece addresses one of the most pressing challenges in semiconductor manufacturing today: how to build wastewater treatment architectures that make water reuse viable at scale, not in stable, controlled conditions, but under the variability of real fab operations.
May 8, 2026
Read the full article on Global Water Intelligence →
Semiconductor fabs are managing water from both ends simultaneously. Ultrapure water demand is growing, and freshwater availability has become a factor in decisions about where new fabs are built. On the wastewater side, process streams are increasingly complex and regulatory requirements are tightening. Reuse is where both pressures converge, but achieving it at scale depends on whether the treatment infrastructure can handle the hardest streams the fab generates.
That is the engineering challenge Dr. Göbbert's article addresses.
Why conventional treatment breaks down
A modern fab generates multiple chemically distinct wastewater streams, not one. The article identifies three that concentrate most of the treatment difficulty.
Grinding, cutting and dicing wastewater carries suspended silicon, abrasives and organics from coolants and adhesives. Flows vary with production schedules, fine particulates resist settling, and surfactant carryover affects anything with a polymer surface downstream.
CMP wastewater presents a harder problem. Abrasive particles at nano and micro scale sit in stable colloidal suspension that gravity-based separation cannot resolve. Slurry chemistry, surfactants, chelants, oxidisers, attacks conventional membrane surfaces. The stream also carries dissolved and particulate metals with regulatory implications.
HF wastewater requires its own treatment sequence. Neutralisation removes the corrosivity but leaves fluoride in solution for downstream RO to handle. The stage between neutralisation and RO needs to remove suspended solids and deliver permeate stable enough for RO to run efficiently and consistently.
Each of the standard approaches, lamella clarifiers, conventional ultrafiltration, biological treatment, encounters specific failure modes on these streams. The article details where and why they break down.
Where ceramic UF fits
The argument Dr. Göbbert makes is architectural.
A treatment stage capable of absorbing feedwater variability, solids swings, surfactant loading, pH and TOC shifts, without destabilising the stages downstream changes the design logic of the entire train. Pretreatment complexity reduces. Downstream RO can be sized for normal operating conditions rather than worst-case variability. Cleaning intervals extend.
Acuriant's Nanostone CUF│ShieldPlus has been deployed across more than 50 semiconductor sites worldwide in this role. The article documents a case at a leading Taiwanese foundry where the incumbent tubular ceramic system had fouled irreversibly, lost 25% of throughput, and required monthly chemical cleaning. Replacing it with CUF│ShieldPlus added 200 m³/day of CMP treatment capacity within the existing building footprint. Chemical cleaning intervals extended beyond five months. Energy consumption dropped 90% against the previous configuration. Recovery stabilised at 80%.
The number that matters
Of all the performance metrics the article cites, Dr. Göbbert points to the cleaning interval as the one that determines whether reuse economics are viable in a CMP application. Five months between CIPs is the figure that makes the business case work. The rest follows from that.
CUF│ShieldPlus is one of the key initiatives behind Acuriant's shortlisting for Water Technology Company of the Year at the GWI Global Water Awards 2026, recognition that reflects not just the technology, but the engineering work behind making ceramic UF viable where conventional treatment falls short.
Read the full article on GWI to get the complete technical argument.