The Army's Natick Labs in Massachusetts has sent a local inventor some good news.
Uncle Sam likes his invention.
It's not a missile or even a guidance system.
It's a machine that can make pure water out of sewage….at low cost.
NHPR's Mark Bevis visited the creator at his company in Nashua and files this report.
Ovation products is located in a small ranch style home on a quiet street in Nashua.
Most offices are on the first floor.
The labs are downstairs in the basement.
A machine shop has taken over what would have been a one car garage.
This rather unassuming location is the setting for a company taking on a sort of alchemy….
The golden end product in this case, however, is clean water.
Bill Zebuhr, Ovation's founder and CEO, describes his invention.
This industrial model stands about 4 feet high.
description cut: it looks like a cylinder about 14 inches in diameter with a dome on top..It's stainless steel with handles so you can lift it off like the hood of a car…and in front are gauges and indicators, a controller on top of a mounting part and that's the pipes going out the base.
The home model would be smaller than this one..a little bit bigger than a fire hydrant.
If Zebuhr and company have their way, you will one day have one of these next to your furnace and water heater.
And that annoying high pitched hum?
It won't be there.
tape: it will sound about like a refrigerator almost inaudible. It'll be in your basement anyway, not in your living room. But for industrial this is perfectly ok..
So what does it do?
This machine can take the water that you would normally send to your septic tank, water you'd flush down the sewer, and make 90% of it usable again.
Zebuhr won't however call the end product drinkable.
tape: We certainly won't be encouraging that in any near term, lawsuits being what they are, but certainly it could be done,
But he says that what comes out of his distiller is cleaner than most well water in New Hampshire.
And one could easily bathe with it, fill the toilet or the furnace, water the garden, or wash clothes.
tape: this is interesting because it's so visual. This went thru a washingmachine. It looks like what you'd expect….soapy whitish water..(me) so this went thru your machine. (Zebuhr)It gave us 10 clean ones and 1 quite dirty…it looks like mud puddle water with a lot of junk floating in it right?(chuckles)
In the simplest of terms, Zebuhr's invention distills water.
It heats the dirty water to the boiling point.
The water evaporates leaving behind the dirt.
The process is as old as Nature itself.
Lakes and oceans evaporate and come down as rain.
And you can distill water on your kitchen stove.
Just boil it and catch the steam in something that makes it condense back into water.
Trouble is most distilling methods, like that pot on your stove, lose a lot of energy in the form of heat.
Tape: It takes a thousand btus to vaporize a pound of water, which is a pint, That adds up quickly so that in a simple distiller it's 35 cents a gallon to distill one gallon.
Zebuhr says distillation has always been the best way to purify water….but it's always been expensive.
Until now.
Tape: The principle of vapor compression distillation is that you recover the heat of vaporization so that you're reusing it to continue to evaporate the next batch of water.
In the process they've been able to reduce the energy loss by about 98%.
He says his distiller can purify water for about point-4 cents a gallon….about 1% of the cost of traditional methods.
And it can produce 20 gallons an hour, which is about 2 times what an average household uses a day.
Currently, Ovation Products is still making each distiller by hand and they cost more than 10 thousand dollars a piece.
But the company would like to have them in mass production by next year…..thus bringing the cost way down.
And one way to do that is to have a customer who wants a lot of them.
Enter the U.S. Army and its labs in Natick Massachusetts.
Chad Haering is a Chemical Engineer with the Equipment and Energy Technology team at the Labs.
Tape: Water is a precisous resource on the battlefield. And it's also expensive, heavy and difficult to move and anything we can do to reduce the amount of water used and reduce the amount of waste water generated takes a load off that logistics system.
Natick Labs won't endorse any product.
It tested and liked three different technologies for purifying water, all for different reasons.
Engineers at Natick report that Zebuhr's distiller did the best job purifying, but Hearing says Ovation needs to work on a few things yet.
Tape: In a field kitchen, people are not used to operating very delicate pieces of electronics or anything like that. It gets kind of rough. They throw them on trucks they throw them off of trucks, so we're looking for a ruggedized system.
If Ovation can make their distiller more durable, a contract with the US Army could prove pretty lucrative.
And that contract could help the company move into other markets like non-governmental aid organizations.
Since nearly 20% of the global population doesn't have access to clean drinking water, there could be a market for Ovation's distillers in developing countries.
But Paul Faeth, with the World Resources Institute says any water purification system that's going to work in the third world will have to meet some pretty basic standards.
tape: the cheaper the better of course and for poor families what is the restriction is the upfront capital… so some way of helping people who make a dollar a day. And then the other element is that the technology would have to be such that it could be managed repaired at a reasonable cost at the local village.
At this point however, Ovation Products isn't really focusing on those far-away villages.
There's a big enough market right here at home..
tape: Look at the u.s. it's a multi-billion dollar market in the u.s., but then when you look at the rest of the world, such a China which will be the biggest market it has the most people of course, but its developing at a rapid rate.
Zebuhr has a few tasks ahead.
He has to convince people that his distiller is cost effective.
But perhaps a tougher battle will be convincing people to reuse the water they used to send down the drain.
For NHPR News, this is Mark Bevis.
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