Our Visible Light Titania™ photocatalyst can purify water in two ways:

Mixed in powder form with the contaminated water, and stirred in a transparent vessel while illuminated with the ultraviolet in sunlight or artificial ultraviolet sources. When the water is purified, the photocatalyst is filtered out for re-use.  While there is an energy cost to the step of separating the clean water and the photocatalyst, the simplicity of the method and apparatus, as well as the high surface area contact between the photocatalyst and the contaminants, are advantageous.

Fixed to a filter material or surface in a transparent window of a container, and illuminated.  Here the advantage is that there is no need to reclaim the photocatalyst from the clean water, but there is a loss of surface area because a good portion of the photocatalytic particles are in contact with a binder. Also, there can be some energy required to flow the contaminated water through the illuminated filter.

Nanoptek’s Visible Light Titania ™ (VLT™) photocatalytic powder can be used in either system.  Our particle size is larger than the industry-leading titania photocatalyst, which makes it easier to filter out, and much of it can even be settled out of the water in a relatively short amount of time.  And in spite of the reduced surface area of our larger particles, we are 24X more effective than the industry-leading titania photocatalyst in, for example, dissociating organic dyes.

The same system hardware that we developed for generating solar hydrogen, namely the flat panel LFG-80LH and the concentrating solar hydrogen generators (CSHGs), can also be used with our Visible Light Titania™ photocatalyst with minor modification.

Additional Nanoptek water cleaning technology solutions:

Companies with water and air-cleaning products that use germicidal UV lamps together with a titania photocatalytic surface should benefit greatly by replacing their photocatalytic surface with Nanoptek’s highly efficient UV-Blue™ photocatalytic surface.

And our SHG300 Solar Hydrogen Generator can be modified to efficiently produce the chlorine gas and other chlorine products that now dominate municipal water cleaning.