Nano Bubble Oxidation Technology
Your water, better through a SeaBreather.
Better water is a definition agreed in advance. Yours enters at the intake, crosses a closed reactor at flow, and goes straight back into the water that fed it, better than it arrived.
The architecture
An intake, a reactor, an outlet.
The bay is where the plant goes. It is not where the chemistry happens. The water itself stays in the bay.
Running the oxidation duty inside a reactor makes the regulatory question an ordinary one: a discharge with a concentration on it, written down before the work starts and sampled at the outlet by us and by somebody who does not work for us. Every environment ministry already knows how to write conditions for that. Gas is the input to the stage. Oxygen and ozone go in, the ozone made from the oxygen on demand and consumed inside the pass that called for it, either dissolved directly or sheared fine enough in line to stay in suspension instead of surfacing as a wasted plume. SeaBreather's technology notes work through the physics.
Oxidation is what the fleet is built around, and it is not the only thing a program can bring. Some coastal events want separation, a stage running alongside the reactor, or capability we operate with a partner. The event and the condition the water has to be in afterward decide. Whatever is selected answers to the same outlet figure, agreed with the consenting authority and read by the verifier.
Contained describes the reaction. The water keeps moving. A hull of this class is specified at roughly 5,000 gallons a minute, and every liter drawn in leaves through the outlet on the same pass, at the depth it was taken from. Vessel systems come smaller and larger than this class, and none of them stores water. The pass is governed by instruments acting in real time, an oversight body reading the same feeds live, and a client who can stop an active deployment outright.
That puts weight on the intake. Approach velocity, screening and draw depth are engineered for the animals in that particular water, and areas inside a zone where nothing may be drawn are named in the scope before anybody signs it. The rest of the deck belongs to the vessel.
Sizing
Gas budgets are worked from the bottom of the reported band.
The figure that does the most commercial work in this sector is how much better nanobubbles move oxygen into water than conventional bubbles do. The abstract of a laboratory study in Science of the Total Environment, on nanobubble aeration of wastewater biofilm, reports oxygen transfer efficiency 1.5 times that of coarse bubbles. Other comparisons report higher multiples, from setups unlike this one.
Sized on a high multiple, a hull holds a large area on a modest gas supply. Sized on 1.5, the same water needs more gas, more hull-hours or a smaller zone. One of those survives an ordinary site, so replenishment intervals and the number of hulls a zone takes are planned from the conservative end.
Organic load
What an oxidation duty measurably does, and how it gets checked.
Where there is organic material in the water, such as bloom biomass or the dissolved carbon a decaying mat leaves behind, the reactor runs with an oxidant fraction in the blend. Its work is measured by assay on influent and effluent, both drawn from a pipe at a known point in the flow, a comparison anybody can repeat. Background load decides how much work is available: oxidant is consumed by whatever is already dissolved before it reaches the target, so two basins with matching cell counts can need very different plans. It is measured on the day.
Verification is tiered by what the mission is carrying. On low-demand work the envelope is already validated, the instruments read continuously, and samples go to an independent laboratory on an agreed cadence. A toxin bloom or oxidative oil work tightens the envelope: more conservative settings at the source, closer independent oversight, and interlocks that cut the oxidant or shut the intake before an out-of-specification discharge can form. Nothing waits on deck for an assay, because there is nowhere on deck to keep it, and no turnaround could clear every parcel of a continuous stream. The control sits upstream of the outlet, where it can still act. A mission run to that envelope does not deliver the hull's full rate.
What that adds up to on a particular water body is established in a calibration phase, on a bounded area, against parameters agreed in writing before a hull moves.
NCCOS, September 2018
Ozone nanobubble aeration on an eight-acre pond near Fort Myers Beach. Algae eliminated within 48 hours, proper reoxygenation, no apparent harm to aquatic life. Another company's system, in fresh water, at pond scale.
NCCOS, July 2020
A commercial nanobubble ozone pump system for ship ballast water, effective against algae, bacteria and motile zooplankton, with no statistically significant adverse residual toxicity downstream. Another party's technology, under their own agreement.
Toxins
Toxicity disabled, without dropping a solid into your sediment.
Precipitation is a relocation. Anything that settles out of solution becomes a benthic obligation, a dredging line and, in a shallow basin, a problem the next storm hands back. Work with the NOAA scientist Dr Peter Moeller, under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement whose term this company has since completed, established that the treatment neutralizes a toxin instead of dropping it out as a solid. Toxicity is taken apart inside the reactor.
There is no active CRADA. Dr Moeller continues as an adviser and as a check on what we claim. A CRADA was never a seal of approval, and NOAA endorses no commercial product.
The original agreement was built around a single nanobubble generator we have moved past, so the work moved to laboratories equipped for the next question of scale: Arizona State University, the Middle East Desalination Research Center and more. Who did what is recorded in the documents behind a program.
Where oxidation stops
Four things this stage leaves alone.
Four boundaries that belong in a scope before anybody signs one.
- Dissolved metals. Nothing is taken out of your water, metals included; the stage neutralizes rather than removes. A hydroxyl radical does not destroy a metal, so a pass alters the organic chemistry bound to one: the species changes and the quantity leaving the outlet does not.
- PFAS. No destruction claim is made for that class of compound.
- Anything living on the bed. A system that treats the water it draws reaches what is suspended in that water. Attached and benthic organisms sit outside it.
- Complete mineralization. Organic contamination is broken down and the effluent verified against a functional endpoint. Reduction to carbon dioxide and water on one pass is a different promise.
The control regime
Bromate is governed by the limit that applies to your water.
Ozone in seawater is a different proposition from ozone in a lake. Bromide is abundant, ozone attacks it around eighty-three times more readily than chloride, and the resulting hypobromite can carry on to bromate. That rate is why the reaction is kept enclosed, instrumented and answerable to a written outlet figure instead of loose in somebody's bay.
No fixed ceiling is published. The usual candidate comes from drinking-water practice, which is the wrong test for open sea. Where treated water reaches a desalination intake, those plants already run equipment that handles bromate. The governing limit is the one that applies to that receiving water, settled with the authority consenting the work and written into the service level agreement before deployment. There are two ways that number gets arrived at, and the envelope is drawn differently in each.
Where the consenting authority holds a standard
That standard governs, and it arrives as the discharge condition written into the consent under whichever statute the authority issues consents. Florida issues under Chapter 403 of its own statutes, which is the law permit FLOA00062 was examined under. A European consent runs off the environmental quality standard set for that water body under the Water Framework Directive, transposed into the member state's own instrument. Elsewhere it is whatever the environment ministry already applies to the designated uses of that stretch of water. The service level agreement adopts the consent's figure and adds the machinery around it: the sampling points, the independent assay cadence, and the interlocks that cut the oxidant before the figure can be crossed.
Where no authority has set one
A figure is derived, by the method a regulator would use to derive it. The published ecotoxicology for the taxa that live in that water supplies the lowest reliable no-effect concentration; an assessment factor is applied to it, wider where the literature is thin and tighter where several species have been tested. That is how the United States Environmental Protection Agency builds an ambient water quality criterion, and how the European Union's technical guidance builds an environmental quality standard; either method can be named in the agreement as the one that produced the number. Three parties sign the result: Alarivean, the authority consenting the work, and the institution engaged to oversee the program. Nobody at this company sets it alone.
Worked: a desalination intake approach on a Gulf coast
Gulf water carries bromide in quantity, so formation is a question to be measured and not a theoretical one. Baseline first: bromide across the year, and background dissolved organic carbon beside it, because the first sets what can form and the second competes for the ozone before any of it does. Then the receptors, and an intake approach has a second one behind the plant. The plant's product water answers to the drinking-water standard its own regulator already holds it to, and that obligation stays with the plant; the approach water is a different water with different designated uses. If reef or seagrass sits down-current of the outlet, the receptor is the sensitive taxa on it, and where the ministry holds no figure of its own the one for those taxa is derived the same way. The lower of the two governs. It goes into the service level agreement before a hull moves, and the instruments, the laboratory cadence and the stop rules are set to it, with the overseeing institution reading the same data as the crew.
Formation is conditional and assessed per water body. Significant bromate needs a threshold of bromide present, which salt and brackish water do not always reach, and ozone reacts indiscriminately, so bromide competes against every other dissolved carbon molecule in the column. Two bays of the same salinity can behave quite differently.
Inline instruments govern the pass on their own authority, cutting the oxidant the moment a reading crosses the line. They cannot see bromate, a stable end-product that needs bench chemistry, so an independent laboratory confirms it on an agreed cadence. You, or an agent you qualify, can hold an active deployment on any suspected breach until it is cleared. Residual oxidant is quenched wherever a pass leaves any, so what reaches the outlet is already inside the agreed figure. The quench cannot exert an oxygen demand of its own. Sulfur reductants do, and spending oxygen at the last step would work against the enrichment the pass exists to produce.
Asked by chemists and environment ministries
Discharge, bromate and metals
What are you putting into our water?
Water. Yours, taken in through the intake, treated inside a closed reactor as it passes, and released oxygen-enriched into the water it came out of.
Nothing is stored aboard, so nothing is taken away and nothing arrives from elsewhere. The release is governed by a number settled before the intake opens: agreed with the consenting authority, read at the outlet, and confirmed by a verifier outside this company.
Does ozonating our seawater form bromate?
It can. Whether it does depends on your water: bromide has to be present above a threshold, and it competes for ozone with all the dissolved carbon in the column.
We publish no fixed ceiling. The limit is whatever governs your receiving water, agreed with the consenting authority and written into the service level agreement before deployment.
Where that authority holds a standard, its consent condition is the standard: Chapter 403 in Florida, an environmental quality standard under the Water Framework Directive in Europe, whatever the ministry applies to that water's designated uses elsewhere. Where it holds none, a figure is derived the way a regulator derives one, from the published ecotoxicology for the taxa living there with an assessment factor applied, and signed by the authority and the overseeing institution as well as by us.
Instruments can shut the oxidant off with no person in the loop, an outside laboratory confirms bromate on an agreed cadence, and you can hold an active deployment on any suspected breach.
Source: Ozone: Science & Engineering — bromate formation in seawater ozonation
Your inline instruments cannot see bromate. What confirms it?
An independent laboratory, on a set cadence.
Real-time probes govern the pass and can cut the oxidant on their own, but they cannot read a stable end-product. Neither job covers for the other.
Does the treatment take metals out of our water?
No. Oxidation disables a molecule; a metal is still a metal afterward.
It also drops nothing out of solution onto your bed, so this stage leaves no sediment to dredge later.
Sources
- NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science — nanobubble technology validated for remediation of harmful freshwater algal blooms, 26 September 2018.
- NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science — nanobubble ozone technology and invasive species in ballast water, 1 July 2020.
- Science of the Total Environment — mass transfer of nanobubble aeration and its effect on biofilm growth.
- Ozone: Science & Engineering — bromate formation and control in seawater ozonation.
For the chemist on your side of the table
Send the water, the season and the chemistry you hold.
Back comes the discharge standard we would sign up to for that water, the assay plan either side of the reactor, and the gas budget that zone would need. In writing, with the assumptions printed underneath.