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

这个i-Corps项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是解决普遍未得到满足的卫生(水和废水)和海水淡化需求。解决全球卫生挑战大大减少了表现为健康问题、生产力损失和寿命缩短的经济负担。到2025年，全球水和废水处理市场的规模将超过6747.2亿美元，原因是饮用水、工业流程和农业用淡水的需求不断增长。基于利基的污水处理需求，如水力压裂(又名水力压裂)，预计将大规模扩张，并带来重大商业机会。创新的、负担得起的和可扩展的废水处理技术，如这里正在开发的那些，提供了处理来自多个市场的各种来源的异类废水的唯一潜在手段。这个i-Corps项目评估了超临界水(SH2O)技术在水处理应用中的早期商业潜力。水不是去除水，而是通过水的临界点(3210磅/平方英寸和374摄氏度)以上的热量和压力来破坏废物，在那里它变成超临界的。SH2O的独特性质是，它像气体一样穿透，但像液体一样溶解，使其成为任何有机物质(例如，脂肪、油、油脂、生物质、纸张和塑料)的非常有用的破坏介质，迅速将这些物质转化为燃料气，只留下干净的水和增值矿物。该项目利用先进的制造工艺来重新定义废水处理的规模和效率，将一个系统从建筑物大小缩小到餐桌大小。这样做可以开发出市场渗透率非常高的交钥匙系统(例如水力压裂或垃圾渗滤液)，一直到非常低的使用量，例如休闲车或单户污水处理。目前的产品受到传统制造实践的限制，只能在工业规模(建筑物大小的单个部件)上提供服务，与此不同，该项目支持添加制造的可扩展性可能会潜在地扰乱全球废水市场的传统规模经济。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.