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

I-Corps项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力将是解决普遍未得到满足的卫生（水和废水）和脱盐需求。解决全球卫生挑战可显著减轻经济负担，这些负担表现为健康问题、生产力损失和寿命缩短。由于饮用水、工业和农业对淡水的需求不断增加，到2025年，全球水和废水处理市场将超过6747.2亿美元。基于生态位的废水处理需求，如水力压裂（又称水力压裂）预计将大规模扩展，并带来重大的商业机会。创新的、经济实惠的、可扩展的废水处理技术，例如这里正在开发的技术，为处理来自多个市场的各种来源的异构废水提供了唯一的潜在手段。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。而不是去除水，水被用来通过加热和压力超过水的临界点（3210 psi和374摄氏度）来破坏废物，在那里它变成超临界。sH2O的独特品质是它像气体一样渗透，但像液体一样溶解，这使它成为任何有机物质（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体，只留下清洁的水和增值的矿物质。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，将系统从建筑物大小缩小到餐桌大小。这样做可以开发交钥匙系统，用于市场渗透，从非常大的容量（例如，水力压裂或垃圾填埋场渗滤液）一直到非常小的容量，如休闲车辆或单户污水处理。目前的产品受到传统制造实践的限制，只能在工业规模（建筑大小的单个组件）上提供服务，而该项目的增材制造可扩展性可能会颠覆整个全球废水市场的传统规模经济。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.