The Cincinnati Business Courier featured AquiSense Technologies in a recent article explaining how our company was chosen for the BIOWYSE project for water disinfection aboard the ISS. The article covers the complexity of disinfection in space and how UV-C LEDs are the perfect fit for the application. LEDs allow for a flexible design and open up new possibilities beyond conventional mercury lamps. UV-C LEDs seem to have a bright future for all disinfection applications.

Here's how a Cincinnati company is contributing to the space station

A Greater Cincinnati company has been tapped to tackle an often-overlooked but vital component on the International Space Station with an eye on participating in the mission to Mars.

Florence-based Aquisense Technologies is part of a program to purify waste water on the ISS using ultraviolet light. Currently, water treatment on the space station is only 88 percent efficient, meaning 12 percent of the water taken aboard becomes unusable.

Aquisense is joining the effort for the ISS with hopes of being a part of the 2020 mission to Mars.

Aquisense is the first company in the U.S. to commercialize the ability to purify water using LED lights. For some context and history, that had been done using chlorine for the last 150 years, which can lead to a bad taste and chemical byproducts in the water. But then it was discovered that ultraviolet light could also purify water by breaking down the DNA of harmful impurities like E. coli.

Aquisense CEO Oliver Lawal explained to me that traditional UV water purification is still expensive and inefficient. UV bulbs used to purify water are big and fragile and contain toxic mercury. The facilities that house the bulbs are too big to use in everyday appliances like drinking fountains or refrigerators, so they could be used to purify the water coming into a house, for instance, but not in appliances. And on top of that, the traditional bulbs take 10 minutes to warm up, can only be turned on four times a day and need to be replaced annually.

Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, seemed to be a natural fit for making UV light to purify water. That was made possible by the 1992 invention of blue LEDs by two Japanese scientists. Previously, LEDs had been red and green. The invention of blue LED, which won the scientists a Nobel Prize in 2014, paved the way for many modern innovations we now almost take for granted, such as smartphone screens or flat-screen TVs.

Source: Cincinnati Business Courier

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Taxonomy

• UV Disinfection
• Purification
• LEDs