SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project offers potentially enormous public health benefits while substantially reducing the costs of water quality monitoring. There are 1. 5 million monitoring sites in the U.S. mandated by either the Clean Water Act or the Safe Drinking Water Act. Current sampling and analysis techniques are extremely labor intensive and costly. Using today's methods, monitoring costs frequently exceed remediation costs. More importantly, the current practice doesn't detect spikes, surges, or spills which, if undetected, can create the huge expense of cleanup or worse. This project centers on a low-cost, continuous on-line monitor to detect the presence of heavy metals, nitrates, and other pollutants in public water supplies and wastewater effluents, and to provide uninterrupted "spike detection" for more than 100 toxic substances. It combines two proven technologies. The research objectives will determine (1) how well the two technologies will each perform their intended function when working together, and (2) how robust the invention is, I.e., over what range of selected parameters will the invention perform its intended function. The technology will have broad applicability in municipal water and wastewater treatment systems, process industries, other significant industrial users, and filtration applications.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will advance the resin/quartz crystal microbalance sensor technology demonstrated in Phase I. The device revolutionizes current water monitoring methods by allowing continuous monitoring where only periodic sampling can now be performed. In the Phase II project, ultra-pure water (UPW) monitors will be fabricated and analyzed at a university test facility as well as at a nuclear power plant and semiconductor facility. The monitor will be calibrated and a computerized model characterizing the device's performance in a UPW environment will be developed. The technology consists of applying ion exchange resins to a quartz crystal microbalance sensor device. Once manufacturing repeatability is achieved, the suite of detected contaminants will be broadened to include a wide range of toxic substances of interest to the federal government. Ultimately we expect to increase the monitor's capability to include all heavy metals set forth in the Clean Water and the Safe Drinking Water Acts. Applications include the development of industrial process control monitors for ultra pure water applications such as semiconductor manufacturing, fail-safe devices to insure the continued effectiveness of drinking water filters, and continuous monitors to detect contaminants in EPA-regulated monitoring sites such as municipal water utilities and wastewater treatment plants.