Terrawater GmbH manufactures Zero Liquid Discharge systems, which remove distillate from (waste) water until salts precipitate. In the continuous process, these salts are removed from the process in the crystallizer TerraCrystalizer. A low-maintenance cooling tower was developed in HighCon for this purpose.

The main difference to the previous cooling tower variants of the company Terrawater GmbH is that the new cooling tower developed in the HighCon project is subjected to mechanical impulses from the outside (shaking) instead of the previous mechanical abrasion of the salts from the humidifier foils inside the cooling tower. The new cooling tower is now characterized by its low-maintenance operation. Instead of requiring maintenance about every six weeks, the new shaker cooling tower will require maintenance only about every 4 to 6 months, depending on the salt loading, thus allowing the TerraCrystalizer to be used in a variety of ways. The shaking cooling tower also appears to be many times superior to the previous variant in terms of the amount of salt applied per day: While the previous cooling tower/settling basin variant has its performance limit at about 100 kg of solids per day, now - test results from the pilot plant extrapolated on Sylt - about 1,200 kg of solids per day can be achieved. The new shaking cooling tower will find its use in all of Terrawater's saline projects in the future.

The separation of specific salts from wastewater is also possible with the TerraCrystalizer. During the HighCon demonstration, the new cooling tower was successfully tested for use in an innovative ZLD process for salt recovery from reverse osmosis concentrates in industrial water recycling. NaCl with > 99% purity could be separated from the wastewater of a cosmetics manufacturer.