This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an electrochemical ozone generator to treat water for drinking and industrial processing. In the US, 85% of all public water systems serve fewer than 3,300 people. For providing these small unit drinking water systems, three congressional findings highlight the challenges. First, the small communities typically have a low tax basis making affordability a challenge unless the system is low in cost. Secondly, the small communities typically do not have technical experts to manage the water disinfection system thus posing a challenge that the system must be simple to operate. Third, the popular chlorine based systems will be outlawed in 2015 for drinking water systems according to the EPA Stage 2 Safe Drinking Water Act. To this end, Reactive Innovations, LLC is proposing to develop an electrochemical ozone generation system that produces ozone directly into a process flow stream using only ambient air and DC electrical power.
The broader impacts of this research are a robust reactor platform is obtained that can be used for small and large scale water treatment processing. The US drinking water equipment market was $115M in 2005 growing at a compound annual rate of 5%. In addition to producing ozone for water and wastewater disinfection, the proposed electrochemical ozone generator may also be applied toward purifying water systems for semiconductor manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, food processing, and pulp/paper processing. These applications represent a worldwide water treatment market projected to be worth $11B by the year 2015.
