I-Corps: Hydrothermal Wet Waste Treatment for Cleaning and Desalinating Industrial Effluents

University Of Alaska Fairbanks Campus, Fairbanks AK

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project will be to address widespread unmet sanitation (water and wastewater) and desalination needs. Solving global sanitation challenges significantly reduces economic burdens that manifest as health problems, productivity losses, and shortened life spans. The global water and wastewater treatment market will balloon past $674.72 billion by 2025, driven by the ever-increasing demand for freshwater used for drinking, industrial processes, and agriculture. Niche-based wastewater treatment needs such as hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a., fracking) are expected to expand on a massive scale and pose major commercial opportunities. Innovative, affordable, and scalable wastewater treatment technologies, such as those under development here, offer the only potential means of treating heterogeneous wastewater from a broad array of sources across a number of markets. This I-Corps project assesses early-stage commercial potential for supercritical water (sH2O) technology in water treatment applications. Rather than remove the water, the water is used to destroy wastes via heat and pressure above water's critical point (3,210 psi and 374 degrees C), where it becomes supercritical. The unique qualities of sH2O are that it penetrates like a gas, but dissolves like a liquid, making it a very useful destruction medium for any organic substances (e.g., fats, oils, greases, biomass, paper, and plastics), quickly turning these substances into fuel gases, leaving behind only clean water and value-added minerals. This project leverages advanced manufacturing processes to redefine scale and efficiency of wastewater treatment, taking a system from building-sized down to the size of a dining table. Doing so enables development of turn-key systems for market penetration at very high volumes (e.g., fracking or landfill leachate) all the way down to very low volumes, such as recreational-vehicle or single-household sewage treatment. Unlike current products, limited by conventional manufacturing practices, that can only be served at an industrial scale (individual components the size of buildings), this project's additive-manufacturing-enabled scalability can potentially disrupt traditional economies of scale throughout the global wastewater market. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.