Sask. company finds cheaper way to purify water
Entrepreneurs develop ‘secret sauce’ to evaporate H2O at 60 C rather than 100 C
A Saskatoon company has developed a machine its founders say offers a cheaper, more energyefficient method to provide clean water to the oil and gas industries, remote communities and areas hit by natural disasters.
“Water is going to be one of the fundamental resources of the future. It’s something that has to be solved,” said Brenton Wirachowsky, hardware engineer for Innocorps.
STRATO, developed by Innocorps, is a desalination device that fits into a 20-foot shipping crate. It can take water from any source, no matter how polluted or salty, and make it cleaner than tap water, according to Innocorps CEO Aarya Shahsavar. The design won the company a science, technology, innovation and collaboration award from the Saskatoon Regional Economic Development Authority earlier this month.
Innocorps was founded in 2009 when Shahsavar, Alex Chan and Dawson James came up with the basic idea for the technology behind STRATO while they were studying engineering at the University of Saskatchewan.
They built their first small-scale prototype in a garage in 2011, while they were still in school. In 2014, they won $50,000 in the U of S’s Tech Venture Challenge, which allowed them to work on the company full time. Now they have a full-scale working model.
STRATO works by evaporating the water, which separates it from the pollutants, then condensing it in a separate chamber.
Using evaporation to clean water is not a new idea.
“Our innovation, our secret sauce, is how we’ve changed that (process),” Wirachowsky said.
Innocorps has devised a method to evaporate the water at 60 C, rather than its regular 100 C boiling point, he said. The company has patents pending for the technology in Canada, the United States, Europe, Australia and India.
At 60 C, the machine can be made out of plastic rather than metal, which is much cheaper. It also requires a lot less energy for heating, which is always a challenge in evaporation technology.
“You have to go back to the physics. There’s a fundamental limit for how much energy it’s going to take when there’s this much salt in water. If anybody says they can get below that limit, they’re lying,” Shahsavar said.
Last week, he and his colleagues went to Alberta to demonstrate STRATO to potential buyers in the oil and gas industry, which Innocorps feels could use the technology to clean and recycle the water used in fracking.
“Oil companies are basically water companies, because they handle so much water,” Shahsavar said.
The company hopes to ramp up production once it finds some interested buyers, he said. The final cost to build units is undetermined so far.
Although STRATO was initially designed to service the oil and gas industries, Innocorps is now hoping to start doing demos for remote communities with problems accessing clean water, Shahsavar said.
The company has also presented to the U.S. military about STRATO’s potential for relief efforts. Wirachowsky said the modular, shipping crate-contained design makes STRATO ideal for use in areas hit by natural disasters. He said other water-purification technologies are either too expensive or too complicated to operate in the field.
“A lot of military and humanitarian organizations are saying it’s just not worth the trouble and shipping in bottled water at $4 a litre. Even with conservative estimates, we beat that by two factors of 10,” Wirachowsky said.