PCA GmbH was founded 1996 in Lebach, Germany as the succession company of the "Polymerchemie Altmeier" enterprise by Dr. Patrick Altmeier.

The Company moved in 2000 to Heusweiler and cooperates with PCCell GmbH in the 200 m² areal.
PCA now has the complete ability of membrane producing, laboratories for the characterization and development into its production facility.
The main field of activity of PCA is the production and development of ion exchange membranes, the engineering of electrodialysis plants for the use of the membranes and the development of new membrane processes.

Development and production of ion exchange membranes

PCA developed a wide variety of special membranes:

• Standard cation and anion exchange membranes for desalination purposes.
• Acidblocker anion exchange membranes with a small proton leakage optimized for the most important common mineral acids.
• Membranes for large organic anions with minimized ohms resitances and an small water transport.
• Diffusion dialysis membranes with high diffusional permeability for mineral acids

It depends on the membrane...

In the last three examples, the use of anion exchange membrane is the main source of technical problems

• if used in contact with mineral acids,
• if the permeating anion is a large organic one or
• if the solvent is organic.

The intrinsic property of anion exchange membranes to have a high permeability for protons (proton leakage) results in low current efficiencies and a small capability of upconcentrating mineral acids. Mobility problems of large anions arise from a closed membrane matrix.

These problems have induced PCA to develop special anion exchange membranes to give contributions to solve these particular problems.