Nano Bubble Oxidation Technology
What the treatment does, and what nobody has proved yet.
Our older technical pages carried five claims we can no longer support. They are listed below with what replaced each of them, because a reviewer will find the old text anyway.
The stage is short to describe. Gas is prepared aboard, sheared into bubbles small enough to stay in suspension, and delivered into the water that needs it. Where there is organic material to break down, an oxidant fraction goes in with it. That is an advanced oxidation process in the ordinary sense of the term, and the letters AOP in this page's address mean nothing more exciting than that.
The mechanism itself is not ours and is not in dispute. Bubbles below roughly a micron stop behaving ballistically: they carry a negative surface charge, resist coalescing back into large bubbles, and present an enormous combined interface for gas to cross. The platform's technical page works through that properly, and there is no point in us writing it twice.
What belongs here is the operator's half. Which claims about this stage survive review, which do not, and which sit on an argument the literature has not finished having.
A correction on bubble size, while we are at it
Our older material described ultra-fine bubbles as under 100 nanometres. The reviewed literature defines the class at under 1,000 nanometres, and characterises it by stability, negative zeta potential, high specific surface area and enhanced gas transfer rather than by a single diameter. We use the published figure. It is less dramatic and it is the one a reviewer will hold us to.
The load-bearing number
Elevenfold is the top of a range, not a constant.
One figure does more commercial work in this sector than any other: the claim that nanobubble aeration raises the gas–liquid mass transfer coefficient roughly elevenfold against conventional bubbles for the same delivered gas volume. It comes from work published in Science of the Total Environment on nanobubble aeration and biofilm growth.
Two things about it are worth saying out loud. The full text is behind a paywall we have not read, so we are relying on the abstract like everyone else quoting it. And adjacent literature comparing similar systems reports enhancement factors from roughly one and a half to nine times, which is a wide spread by any standard.
So elevenfold is the high end of a range and we treat it that way. Gas budgets, endurance planning and the size of a zone one hull can hold are worked from the lower end of the spread, on the principle that a plan built on the best published number fails on the first ordinary site.
If a competitor quotes you eleven times as a flat specification, ask them which paper, whether they have read past the abstract, and what the rest of the literature says. Those three questions separate a claim from a citation.
The rewrite
Five claims that used to be on these pages.
The client instruction for this redesign was that the whole estate meet one evidence standard. Applying it to our own technical pages meant deleting things, and deleting quietly is worse than not deleting at all — the old text is cached, quoted in decks and sitting in somebody's diligence folder.
“Tested by NOAA”
Why it went. NOAA has not tested this equipment. Its coastal science centres validated other companies' nanobubble ozone systems in 2018 and in 2020, and the four letters in the second release are not our four letters.
What stands instead. Both studies are cited on this page as somebody else's result. They establish that the approach clears what it is aimed at without poisoning the water downstream. They establish nothing whatever about our hull.
“Precipitates nitrogen, phosphorus and inorganic metals out of solution”
Why it went. Unsupported. The citation those pages leaned on could not be located in any academic search by anybody who tried, and precipitation invites the obvious question of where the material ends up.
What stands instead. Work under our NOAA research agreement points somewhere more useful: inorganic toxins can be sterilised in place rather than dropped out as a solid. Our own account, given as ours.
“Shown successfully to neutralise biohazards”
Why it went. Blooms, viruses and organic toxins, presented as a demonstrated fact. It is not demonstrated, least of all in open water at coastal scale, and a phrase like that would not survive one afternoon of technical review.
What stands instead. An oxidation stage does measurable work on organic load, verified by assay either side of a pass. What that amounts to on your particular water is what a calibration phase exists to find out.
“Oxidation technology trusted worldwide”
Why it went. No deployment history sits behind it. One permitted field trial in Florida is the first-party record, and a permit is not a portfolio.
What stands instead. Nothing. The sentence did no work that a plain description of the actual record does not do better and more safely.
“The only gas generator meeting NOAA-determined ocean application requirements”
Why it went. Two problems in one line. An exclusivity nobody outside the company can check, and a phrase that reads as though a federal agency had set a standard and then awarded it to us.
What stands instead. The gas plant is described by what it does on the deck. Where an exclusivity matters commercially it belongs in a contract rather than on a public technical page.
Four letters, two owners
The acronym collision, flagged before somebody else finds it.
NCCOS published two releases that any reader researching this technology will reach within an hour. A 2018 one on an ozone nanobubble system that cleared algae from an eight-acre Florida pond inside 48 hours, with reoxygenation and no apparent harm to aquatic life. A 2020 one on a ballast water system found effective against algae, bacteria and motile zooplankton, with no statistically significant residual toxicity in the receiving water.
Read the second one carefully. The equipment on test is called Nanobubble Ozone Technology, and it abbreviates to NBOT. This network uses the same four letters for Nano Bubble Oxidation Technology. Different company, different hardware, different agreement, same initialism.
Skim-read, that collision turns a federal release into an apparent validation of us. We would rather point at it ourselves than have a reviewer discover it and reasonably wonder what else on the site works that way.
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, a pond, fresh water.
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 cooperative agreement.
Our own research, stated as ours
The NOAA agreement, and the one finding that came out of it.
We hold a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with NOAA. It is private and was never posted, which is simply what the instrument is, so a search returns nothing and the nothing carries no information either way. We state it because it is ours to state.
Work under it with the agency scientist Dr Peter Moeller concerns inorganic toxins. The finding is that the treatment can sterilise them where they are: what makes them poisonous is taken away, rather than the material being dropped out of the water as a solid that somebody then has to lift, store and account for. Anyone who has run a remediation contract will recognise why that distinction is worth more than it first sounds.
Two boundaries on that paragraph. It is our account of our own research and has not been published by anyone outside. And a research agreement is not an endorsement — NOAA does not endorse commercial products, has endorsed nothing here, and no page in this network should be read as suggesting otherwise.
The regulated risk
Bromate is the constraint that shapes a dose plan in seawater.
Ozone in seawater is a different proposition from ozone in a lake. Bromide is abundant, ozone reacts with it around eighty-three times more readily than with chloride, and the hypobromite that results can carry on to bromate. Bromate is regulated. A technical page that leaves it out is not being concise, it is being evasive.
The published controls are unglamorous and they work. Hold ozone concentration and contact time under a site limit; watch pH and temperature; accept that doing so costs you disinfection efficiency, because it does. Ammonia or peroxide dosing can suppress formation further, with their own trade-offs.
What that means in practice is that the ceiling is set before the vessel moves, against a measured background for that water, and the log records what was actually applied. A regulator reconstructing a bad day will read that log, not this page.
Still being argued
Whether the bubbles do chemistry of their own.
In 2020 a study from Moleaer and Arizona State University reported that injected nanobubbles produce reactive oxygen species, hydroxyl radicals among them. In 2023 Chae, Kim, Kim and Fortner published a controlled study in ACS ES&T Engineering finding radical generation from nanobubbles minimal, if it happened at all, under the ambient conditions they tested.
Both are real work. They disagree.
For a vendor that is an interesting footnote. For an operator it is a commercial position, because the two readings do not cost the same. On the optimistic one, a smaller oxidant dose would clear the same load and every site would carry a hidden margin. On the sceptical one, the result is governed entirely by oxidant, contact time and how much of the dose the background organic load consumes before it reaches anything you cared about.
We price the sceptical reading. Not out of modesty — because a programme that quietly depends on the generous interpretation of a contested mechanism will fail on the first hard site, in front of the people who commissioned it.
Asked by chemists and environment ministries
Five straight answers
Has NOAA tested this equipment?
No.
NOAA's coastal science centres validated other companies' nanobubble ozone equipment in 2018 and in 2020, and both studies are worth your time. Neither involves our hull, our gas plant or our water. We hold a separate research agreement with NOAA, which is a different thing again, and which is not an endorsement of anything.
Does the treatment precipitate nitrogen, phosphorus or metals out of the water?
Our older pages said so. We have withdrawn it, because we cannot support it and because the source those pages cited could not be located by anyone who went looking.
What we do state, as our own account of our own research under a NOAA agreement, is that inorganic toxins can be sterilised in place instead of being dropped out as a solid that then needs somewhere to go.
Is the elevenfold mass-transfer figure reliable?
Treat it as the top of a range rather than a constant. The study reporting it sits behind a paywall we have not read past the abstract of, and comparable work in the literature reports enhancement from roughly one and a half to nine times.
Gas budgets here are planned from the lower end of that spread.
Source: Science of the Total Environment — mass transfer of nanobubble aeration
Does ozonating our seawater form bromate?
It can, and in bromide-rich Gulf and Red Sea water it is the constraint that shapes everything else about a dose plan.
Concentration and contact time are capped at a site limit, pH and temperature are watched, and the disinfection efficiency lost to that ceiling is accounted for rather than quietly recovered by dosing higher.
Source: Ozone: Science & Engineering — bromate formation in seawater ozonation
Do the bubbles themselves generate hydroxyl radicals?
Genuinely unresolved, and the disagreement is between two serious pieces of work rather than between a study and a press release.
Nothing in a programme is priced on the optimistic reading of it. If radicals turn out to be contributing, every site gains margin. If they are not, our plans were right.
Source: Chae, Kim, Kim & Fortner, ACS ES&T Engineering, 2023
Sources cited on this page
- NOAA National Centres for Coastal Ocean Science — nanobubble technology validated for remediation of harmful freshwater algal blooms, 26 September 2018.
- NOAA National Centres for Coastal Ocean Science — nanobubble ozone technology and invasive species in ballast water, 1 July 2020. This is the release carrying the NBOT collision.
- Science of the Total Environment — mass transfer of nanobubble aeration and its effect on biofilm growth. Abstract read; full text paywalled.
- Chae, Kim, Kim & Fortner — reactive oxygen species generation from nanobubbles, ACS ES&T Engineering, 2023.
- Ozone: Science & Engineering — bromate formation and control in seawater ozonation.
- Springer — nanobubble stability and zeta potential.
- ScienceDirect — nanobubble review literature, for the sub-1,000 nanometre definition and its characteristic properties.
Send it to a chemist first
We would rather be argued with in week one.
Bring your own reviewer to the site read and let them push on the bromate ceiling, the assay plan and the gas budget. An objection raised then costs an afternoon. The same objection in season two costs a programme.