SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to help wastewater treatment plants become compliant with emerging environmental regulations, while saving energy and without adding cost. It has potential to reduce the amount of biosolids that need to be shipped off-site and landfilled by up to 85% as well as completely destroy odors and pathogens. As a result, the project may also enhance social justice throughout the country. Currently, low-income and disadvantaged communities inherit waste from other communities, sometimes very far away from where the waste originated. They inherit the stench, the vectors (rats, flies, birds) and toxins. For example, 7% of the biosolids produced by New York City end up in Alabama, via trains and trucks. People living near the landfills and along transportation routes no longer use their porch because of the stench. By improving the economics of a technology that destroys organics much better than state-of-the-art technologies, wastewater treatment plants will become cleaner, less malodorous and use less energy. Other markets could open as well including clean power and chemical manufacturing. Finally, the project may lead to increased hiring of employees over the next three years. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to create an affordable and reliable process to cleanly and completely destroy organic waste, extract more resources and energy from sludge and biosolids at wastewater treatment plants while considerably reducing the amount of biosolids that need to be shipped off-site for disposal. This objective will be achieved by improving a process that uses water contained within the waste to create a hyper oxidative environment. Similar processes use costly and hazardous pure oxygen, are extremely energy intensive, and are plagued with high maintenance cost. By making innovations in energy recovery, the use of air as an oxidant instead of oxygen is possible without the large cost associated with having to heat and compress an entire air stream- oxygen plus inert nitrogen. Once optimal technical conditions for energy recovery are identified, the project will enter the design and fabrication phases. The resulting new energy recovery module will be added to an existing system. The prototype will be tested for continuous operation. New insights into energy recovery will be gained, which will benefit the scientific community as a whole.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.

The broader impact of this SBIR Phase II project is in the creation of a much-needed alternative to biosolids disposal. Biosolids are a by-product of wastewater treatment; their formation and disposal contribute to significant air, water, and soil pollution. In particular, biosolids contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and the release of over 350 organic contaminants, including high concentrations of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Biosolids disposal challenges are expected to grow due to population increases and stricter environmental regulations. Current biosolids disposal options have shortfalls and disposal costs are increasing. This project develops a breakthrough technology that cleanly and affordably destroys the organic contaminants present in biosolids. Air, water and soil pollution will be reduced, and, importantly, wastewater treatment plants will be able to meet new regulatory standards for sustainability. Volume of final by-product, and therefore transport cost and associated emissions, will be decreased by over 85%. The proposed project turns supercritical water oxidation (SCWO) into an energy-efficient technology by recovering compressive energy. SCWO rapidly and completely destroys organics. To date, the technology has been used in few applications, including chemical weapons dismantling. Recovery of compression energy saves 30-40% of total treatment cost, opening new markets, such as wastewater treatment. Recovery of compression energy during SCWO has been demonstrated previously. This project's goals are to further optimize, scale-up and iterate on compression energy recovery equipment for added capacity and reliability, and long-term field test these updated/new pieces of equipment by adding them to an existing supercritical water oxidation pilot system. The goal for the system is to achieve reliability on par with industrial high-pressure compressors, which can operate over 24,000 hours between major services. 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.