Aqua4^™ Solar Desalination Technology

WaterFX is an independent water producer, building sustainable solar desalination systems to provide affordable sources of distributed freshwater. Their Aqua4^™ product is an "engineered aquifer" for reliably producing freshwater when and where it's needed. Aqua4^™ uses the oldest technique in the world, distillation, for turning tainted water into fresh water. The difference is that it uses energy from the sun to power the process. Concave mirrors, called a solar trough, focus the sun's rays on a pipe that's filled with oil. The sun's energy heats the oil which is used to generate steam through a heat pump. The steam is then used to evaporate brackish water. The end products are fresh water and a briny residue that looks like yellow powder when it dries and which contains salts, metals. recovered fertilizer, gypsum, and other contaminants. A single Aqua4^™ module generates 65,000 gallons of freshwater per day - 70 acre-feet per year - from wastewater, drainage water, runoff, saline groundwater or industrial process water with a 100 percent recovery rate.

Water FX has successfully developed and tested a 25,000 gal/day prototype in California's Central Valley, near the town of Firebaugh in Fresno County. This part of the San Joaquin Valley, long known for its fertile fields and successful crops, has been plagued for decades by irrigation drainage problems. The project was initially intended to treat the agricultural runoff water to prevent contamination of the nearby rivers, but the 4-year long draught that has devastated the region has provided new impetus for reusing water. Current techniques of capturing and reusing agricultural run-off can only recycle the water 3-5 times, and then only for salt resistant crops. This new technology will allow unlimited numbers of recycles to maximize water usage, as well as provide the opportunity to grow a wider range of crops.

Building on the success of the pilot plant, Water FX is now in the design phase for a commercial scale plant called HydroRevolution with capacity of 1.6 billion gallons (5,000 acre-feet) of freshwater per year near the rural community of Panoche. This much larger facility will include two additional major features. 1) Excess heat will be stored in thermal storage tanks filled with a solid, highly conductive material that can be drawn upon to reheat the transfer fluid for 24-hour-a-day operation and during cloudy spells. 2) A natural gas backup will be built on-site, in case it proves necessary for full operations to continue in the typically cloudy periods of January and February. Water from the plant will be available for agricultural and home use. It's slated to go online next summer.

For more information, visit the HydroRevolution website.