Making sure water is safe to drink, bathe or swim in comes down to using chemicals or ultra-violet light.
But one local company is using LEDs as the UV light source, which its CEO says is cheaper, faster and uses less energy.
And now, the International Space Station, future Mars missions, Boeing’s 787 Eco Demonstrator, and the city of Las Vegas all have something in common. They have or will have a water filtration part designed by AquiSense Technologies.
The Erlanger company started in Oliver Lawal’s basement seven years ago. Before that, he had decades of experience with UV technology. But not with LEDs like he uses now; it was with the older mercury-vapor lamps.
“It’s a bit like Tesla is to cars in that we’re using semiconductors instead of traditional lamps which are more like a tube television," he explains of LEDs. "We’re more like a flat screen TV or like an electric car.
“The LEDs are really small," he continues. "They’re like a one-millimeter square. And then we fit them into a circuit board and we can put multiples for large arrays."
We walk into the AquiSense manufacturing space, which is just behind the company’s Erlanger offices and immediately see workers in a clean room assembling components.
“Most of our products are incorporated into other pieces of equipment,” points out Lawal, including water filtration systems from Mitsubishi that go into Japanese baths and showers, as residents there reuse the water after it's been "cleaned."
How does it work?
UV technology disrupts the DNA so contaminants can’t replicate and are then inactive. Lawal explained if he swallowed water with 100 E. coli bugs they would become 1,000 and then a million, which would make him sick. If you inactivate the E. coli with chemicals, it would dissolve them, but that is not great for long-term use in our bodies. With UV, the bugs can’t do any damage, no chemicals necessary.
“It sounds really techie but it’s really a natural process that planet Earth has been managing pathogens for billions of years," Lawal says.
Even with the high-tech uses of LED disinfection on the International Space Station and eventually Mars, Lawal says most people are familiar with the water cooler AquiSense makes to fill up your bottle at the gym, at school and at airports.
