Inexpensive Drinking Water Chlorination Unit for Small Communities

More than 250 drinking water systems exist for small communities in Puerto Rico that serve between 25 and 500 individuals. These water systems fall outside of the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority and, thus, have insufficient water treatment systems or no water treatment systems. Water sources for these communities are from groundwater and surface water with flow rates up to 50,000 gallons per day for a community of 500 people. To improve upon this water treatment process, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) desires improved novel filtration and chlorination methods that can disinfect and filter these drinking water sources. To address this need, Reactive Innovations, LLC, proposes a Phase I SBIR project to develop an on-site hypochlorite generator that can continuously chlorinate surface groundwater. In this project, Reactive Innovations will apply its electrochemical reactor technology toward a compact and inexpensive system to produce hypochlorite on-site and on-demand for varying water flow rates and required disinfection levels. This will involve producing the reactor specifically for treating upwards of 50,000 gallons/day of surface water, developing the balance of a plan and control system, and evaluating the system for disinfecting water. The improved design of the electrochemical reactor will help lower the system cost, one of the major drivers for deploying a water disinfection system into the marketplace. The immediate application of this electrochemical reactor technology is toward an improved chlorination process for small communities in Puerto Rico. The modular design of the reactor technology will allow us to scale it to medium and large water disinfection systems as well as scale it to produce higher levels of sodium hypochlorite for wastewater cleanup.