The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project will be the availability of advanced, resilient technologies to U.S. towns and cities that need to upgrade or expand their drinking water infrastructure. Early prototypes of this technology have transformed several remote towns by providing reliable, high-quality water on tap to over 83,000 people. The next generation of water treatment technologies are less complex than the highly mechanized systems that were developed in the last century. The new series of municipal-scale drinking water treatment processes relies on an advanced understanding of the interactions between particles, fluid, and flow to more efficiently remove pathogens and other contaminants. The process designs remove particles, pathogens, and some dissolved contaminants using special adhesive nanoparticles with the most energy efficient technologies currently available. The benefits to society will be ultra-low energy, resilient, hack-proof, high-performing water treatment infrastructure that can easily be operated without reliance on computers or mechanized systems. The proposed technology will substantially reduce the cost of maintaining and upgrading water treatment infrastructure and are expected to propel a new era of competition and innovation in the water treatment sector.
The proposed project will advance the understanding of particle, pathogen, and dissolved contaminant removal mechanisms. The core drinking water treatment technologies have largely stagnated in the past decades because the underlying mechanisms were not understood and it was necessary to rely on empirical designs. This created an opportunity to develop the science of the core drinking water treatment processes and then dramatically improve those designs. The proposed research and development will build on the recently developed hydraulic flocculation model and new insights into the dominant particle removal mechanism in upflow fluidized floc filters. The goal of the research is to use the new insights into the treatment processes to begin to optimize their design. A pilot scale facility using a surface water source will be configured to test: 1) new designs for the upflow fluidized floc filter (UFFF) inlet diffuser and jet reverser system, 2) the UFFF depth, 3) a more compact tube settler system, and 4) stacked rapid sand filter extraction system. Performance will be measured using particle counters, turbidimeters, a UV meter to measure dissolved organics, and a pathogen panel to measure pathogen removal efficiency. The goal is to develop design recommendations for the next generation of water treatment technologies.
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.
