A city-based [Bangalore] scientist has found an environment-friendly way to treat used water without mixing any chemicals so that it can be safely reused.
Dr Rajah Vijay Kumar’s invention holds promise for effective waste-water recovery and management, especially when it is increasingly becoming a scarce resource worldwide.
Called the Fine Particle Thrombousthai Reactor (FPTR), the innovative technology also has the potential to effectively and economically treat waste water or effluents dumped by industries and reuse it.
“We have built a pilot FPTR reactor to process 25,000 liters of contaminated coffee-wash water in Kodagu district to reuse processed water, complying with relevant standards. The interesting thing is that the recovered water costs merely 3.6 paise per litre,” says Kumar, who developed the technology at the Bangalore’s Scalene Energy Research Institute (SERI).
How it works
According to Kumar, FPTR technology is an automatic computer-controlled multi-stage system which uses high-intensity short-wave resonance to get rid of impurities. But what is unique in this system is that it doesn’t need any chemicals and depends only on electricity for its operation, making it a cost-effective technique.
“The technology works based on the principles of blood-clotting in our body, technically known as Thrombousthai reaction. Every matter in the universe has a specific natural frequency, and when you go close to their resonating frequency in an appropriate environment, particles lose their charges that keep them apart and decide to clot together.
This happens in our body too, when blood clots to cause heart attacks and strokes. But in case of technology, the loss of charge is achieved by a protein called prothrombin. Since this technology uses a specific physiochemical property of anything suspended or dissolved in water, that was first discovered by the invention, and thus us we don’t find the necessity to add any chemicals,” he explained.
To start with, Kumar said they plan to target small polluters, like car service stations, small garment-dyeing units, small-scale plating industries, mass urban dwellings that are small but cumulatively the largest unaccounted-for polluters.
Another area of application of this technology is to recover surface water from lakes and rivers contaminated by sewage and industrial toxins to provide drinking water at low cost.
Water and pollution
- 70 per cent of industrial waste is dumped without treatment, polluting usable water supply
- India alone discharges 48,797 million cubic metres of waste water annually
- Each litre of waste water discharged further pollutes about 5 to 8 litres of freshwater
