Company
Portfolio Data
Back to Company SearchSteve Bitterly
UEI: UHKJDHDTQ1V4
Number of Employees: 1
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
SBIR/STTR Involvement
Year of first award: 2022
3
Phase I Awards
0
Phase II Awards
N/A
Conversion Rate
$479,971
Phase I Dollars
$0
Phase II Dollars
$479,971
Total Awarded
Awards
Advancing Water Purification Solutions for a Resilient America
Amount: $174,769 Topic: 9.4
Water reuse is gaining support as a local, resilient solution. Wastewater recycling conserves resources by substituting treated effluent for potable sources in non-potable uses like irrigation and industrial processes. A key obstacle is the potential health risks from chemical contaminants that persist through treatment and pathogens that could evade disinfection. Recent contaminants of concern include pharmaceuticals, personal care product chemicals, and Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Conventional water treatment methods have limitations in removing emerging contaminants and can have high operational costs and environmental impacts. While advanced technologies address more contaminants, they are energy-intensive and expensive providing limited options to address the current challenge of increasing accessibility to freshwater supplies. Pure Spun Innovations (PSI) is proposing a new methodology and technology to address the problem of water contamination by PFAS via an efficient and effective phase-change system. PSI’s novel phase-change water/fluid purification technology uses a NASA-validated vapor compression distillation (VCD) unit, uniquely coupled with parallel concentric rotary-boilers/condensers. VCD systems and are scalable from portable hand-carried purifiers up to industrial sized configurations to fulfill a critical unmet need in wastewater PFAS removal.
Tagged as:
SBIR
Phase I
2024
DOC
NOAA
Energy-efficient, portable PFAS decontamination from drinking water
Amount: $49,994 Topic: AF212-CSO1
Potable water shortages caused by increasing levels of contaminated water supplies, including PFAS chemicals like PFOA, PFOS, and others, are accelerating the crucial need for new cost-effective methods and technologies for water purification and remediat
Tagged as:
SBIR
Phase I
2022
DOD
USAF
Develop a novel phase-change water/fluid purification technology that uses a NASA-validated vapor compression distillation (VCD)
Amount: $255,208 Topic: R
Summary Contamination of water bodies with residual PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), aka “forever chemicals” have become a pervasive and widespread problem throughout the USA and worldwide despite ongoing regulations and policies to reduce and eliminate their prevalent use in manufacturing of many products. These fluorocarbon structured chemicals are known to collect in fish, animal tissues, and are increasingly being detected in blood serum samples of humans, with determined links to health degradation issues in growth and development, reproduction, thyroid function, liver damage, disruptions of immune system, and links to increased rates in cancer. Water supplies in 66 regions across the USA serving 6 million people had at least one or more PFAS-type contamination level at or above the EPA’s safety limits. We seek to propose and demonstrate a new phase-change rotary distillation-purification system and method that should completely remove these chemicals from drinking water supplies, using a technology that is highly efficient and scalable in size, from portable up to industrial systems. The technology utilizes energy recovery and operates at low-power and low-specific energy, and has a cost-effective pathway for large-scale commercialization in homes and scalable to industrial wastewater purification requirements. Earlier versions of this technology have been NASA-validated, however, we advanced certain key heat transfer mechanisms that achieve a 10x increase above reported boiler-condenser heat transfer coefficients for known and commercially available phase-change distillation technologies. Previous testing demonstrated a 10-fold increase in heat transfer efficiency through testing with Sandia National Labs and Cedars Sinai Medical Center, using inexpensive components with instrumented earlier bench-model testing. References show that phase-change purification by traditional distillation (high-power, with no energy recovery) removes all PFAS contaminations in water samples, but these technologies are immensely cost-prohibitive with no pathway for cost-effective application uses or commercialization. Specific aims propose testing several new key technology features beyond previous testing, which should demonstrate a cost-effective pathway for commercialization. These technology features include testing with and without PFAS contaminations the efficacy of a new rotary liquid-vapor seal that is exceedingly low-cost, near unlimited life, and very low frictional drag; self-cleaning features that would automatically maintain long operation with high- performance; and testing a conceptually new centrifugal pump that theoretically is capable of removing the fresh and waste water streams from sub-atmospheric pressure operation to above atmospheric pressures at very low power.
Tagged as:
SBIR
Phase I
2022
HHS
NIH