Development of an in situ filtration process to improve surface water quality (L2M application)

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Pressure on surface waters is being increased due to human actions on land and new climate change scenarios. These new variables are causing impacts on water resources and sediment by watershed discharge or direct release of contaminants such as phosphorus and nitrogen, which are considered important factors for primary productivity. For this fundamental reason, eutrophication scenarios are augmented. In eutrophication occurrence, surface water will go through physical chemical and biological change including obnoxious smells, decrease of dissolved oxygen, and harmful toxin production. The market needs for remediation procedures to attenuate the presented issue are increasing as the occurrences of eutrophic water resources are growing every year. The eutrophication scenario attenuation is being addressed by the removal of suspended particles which are associated with nutrients using a floating filtration system, a silt curtain (i.e., for containment of a specific area), and geotextiles (woven and non-woven) as filter media. A novel, flexible, reactive and potentially economic environmental remediation is under development. Up to this date there is no similar treatment is being proposed in the specialized literature. By the geotextile filtration presented, removal of suspended solids and particulate phosphorus could be achieved reducing the likeability of eutrophication scenarios, improving the water resource quality and possibly decreasing/suppressing algal/cyanobacteria blooms. Therefore this Lab 2 Market application will assess the market for this technology to help prepare for the NSERC I2I Phase I proposal. Potential customers, their business model, and market entry point will be determined. These hypotheses are then validated through market research. The program is of four months in duration and is broken up into three distinct training phases. The Entrepreneurial Lead (EL) will be a full time PhD student who will work on the project full-time (20 to 40 hours/week) over the duration participating in all training sessions and all activities. By the end of the program, the appropriate path forward for the filtration project will be determined.