Nanotech For Water Treatment

About

Introduction This is a water purification project.  One of the key processes for improving water quality is aeration or oxygenation.  When waste water is cleansed in sewage plants, oxygenation is required to enable the organisms which consume the particles which are in suspension to thrive. Current technology is slow, inefficient, very power consuming and odour generating.  We are introducing new technology using nano bubbles, which will address all these issues, and will represent state-of-the-art equipment for the water industry. It will be highly affordable, with a rapid payback on investment.  Water Purification Water purification and decontamination are major issues in every country around the world. These take many forms, including: Water purification within sewage plants Leachate (polluted water run-off) from land fill sites Cleansing of outfall from water-dependent industries such as brewing, food processing, paper manufacture etc. Run off from farms containing excess fertilizer Water cleansing in anaerobic digestion plants Addressing BOD (biological oxygen demand) in water courses Water Purification Today Within sewage plants, our initial target market, the current typical oxygenation process involves large, power-consuming pumping systems which blow fine air bubbles 24/7 through the waste water. The problems with this solution are as follows: heavy electricity demand (within the EU, 1% of all electricity consumption is used in water treatment) fine air bubbles are blown through the water. However: the bubbles rise almost immediately to the surface and are dissipated dissipated bubbles carry odours from volatile emissions to the locality because of the rapid dissipation of the bubbles, air has to be constantly blown through the waste water, creating the high power requirements water oxygenation and cleansing are slow and inefficient equipment tends to be large and bulky. Our Big Idea Our system uses nano bubble technology rather than either aeration or micro bubbles.  When nano bubble technology is used, we can solve all the issues identified above, and simultaneously exploit a technology which can also address additional economic opportunities such as hydrogen sulphide pollution, hydro-carbon remediation, blue-green algae blooms and reduction in the use of hydrogen peroxide. Our system uses the diffusion of air within water in the form of nano bubbles to provide a higher oxygen transfer rate than traditional methods. This results in greater energy efficiency and thus lower costs. Using bubbles at the nano scale increases the surface area of the air bubbles enormously, meaning that more oxygen is transferred more quickly than with other methods. It also stays in the water for far longer. This oxygen is vital to the population of organisms that form the aerobic digestion part of the process. During this process organisms are limited in numbers by the amount of oxygen available to them, so the higher the concentration of oxygen, the more efficient the process. The Technology Where traditional air bubbles rise to the surface within a couple of seconds, and micro bubbles rise within a few minutes, nano bubbles stay absorbed within the water for weeks.  The effect is that the water remains oxygenated for long periods resulting in a much faster purification process, low odour emissions and a massive reduction in power consumption. The power consumption benefits arise because: since the nano-bubbles remain long term in the water, continuous bubble generation is not required as a result, our system, when (for example) installed within a sewage plant, can be used for more than one treatment area. Markets The core market for Nanogentech is water purification within sewage plants. There are 1800 sewage plants in the UK alone; since many of these plants have multiple silos, we estimate that the potential for sewage requirements in the UK will be significantly more than 3,000 units. The UK, in terms of population, is around 1% of the world’s population; using population as a measure of global potential, there is a market of some 300,000 water oxygenation units for sewage plants alone. Assuming a sales price of GBP100K per unit, that represents a global market potential of GBP30bn. There are many other potential markets for the technology, both within and outside the water industry. These include: leachate (polluted water run-off) from land fill sites cleansing of water outfall from water-dependent industries such as brewing, food processing, paper manufacture etc. runoff from farms containing excess fertiliser anaerobic digestion plants addressing BOD (biological oxygen demand) in water courses recycling of sewage water in a city or building reducing pollution from petro-chemical spills Using very rough metrics, we guesstimate that the total potential for these applications together is as large as that for sewage plants alone, and so we postulate a total global potential for our system and its variants at some GBP60bn. These figures do not include other products, such as the water oxygenator combined with electrolysis (a product which does not yet exist on the market) and other potential products which could be derived from the same design, or other products aimed at the same markets, which make the potential even larger. Nanogentech is not a water company, but a nano bubble gasification company, implying that there will be many more potential markets for its technology in the future.