Water reuse is of increasing importance to the military installations, but most methods treat water for non-potable uses such as laundry, showers, or washing vehicles. Reverse osmosis (RO) remains the current standard for potable water treatment during water emergencies.

This project will demonstrate a robust, low-maintenance, and cost-effective building-scale potable water production system that uses photovoltaic (PV) canopies or waste heat from diesel generators as energy inputs. Utilizing a next-generation, mobile vacuum thermal distillation (VTD) system with dual-mode energy and cooling flexibility, the project will demonstrate the capability to purify local compromised, brackish, or saline waters – including effective removal of contaminants – without drain on installation power resources.

The system is intended to meet federal drinking water standards, provide resilience for fixed installations and forward operating bases, and offer a superior alternative to conventional RO methods, particularly in water emergency or grid-outage scenarios.

PAX Scientific Mobile Distillation Unit

PAX Scientific’s VTD system uses a novel distillation cycle driven by a unique application of the Venturi Principle that lowers the operating pressure to 0.1994 bar and allows water vaporization at a temperature of 60°C. Simply stated, the system boils water at low temperature and condenses the vapor into pure distilled water, leaving salts and other particulates behind in a concentrate.

The system can run off renewable energy assets. Alternatively, it can draw low-grade waste heat from other sources, such as diesel generators deployed during emergencies. Generators are 60-70% efficient and require active cooling. The extra 30-40% of the fuel burned is dissipated (wasted) as heat going into the environment. This waste heat is captured and used as a thermal input to trigger distillation.

By innovating in both materials and process steps, the system is no more capital intensive than RO but much lower in maintenance time and material costs, resulting in a lower levelized cost of water while also expanding the range of treatable source waters. Successful demonstration of the technology will also increase interest in microgrid capability on installations, which currently represents just a fraction of energy assets. Demonstrating the production of potable water not just from PV but via waste heat from diesel generators offers value beyond emergency situations, including that the technology can be used to concentrate brine from existing genset-based RO systems, to cost-effectively expand potable water production and reduce brine disposal costs. (Anticipated Project Completion - 2028)