Water is our planet’s most invaluable resource, and it is one that must be both accessible and secure for a society to function. With climate change increasingly taking its toll on the planet, extreme weather patterns regularly impact water supply. Natural disasters can ruin homes and lives and disrupt the water supply in affected areas.
At Purafy, we believe in a world where clean water is accessible to all. We want to make this vision a reality by working with partners worldwide that apply our cutting-edge materials and innovations to deploy our water treatment technology. Our PORTAGE filtration system, for example, uses proprietary graphene-based membrane and adsorption technology to transform water from floods and disaster sites into pure, clean drinking water at considerable volume and flow rates.
A Special Visit
In January 2022, the Purafy team was invited to Kentucky to provide testing demonstrations, training, and acquire direct feedback from the US Army. In designing the PORTAGE, the engineering team at Purafy identified perceived gaps in what the Army’s current Best Available Technology (BAT) for mobile water purification was capable of, and then sought to fill that niche with a specific design for filtering natural in-land waters for non-coastal (desalination) operations.
Over three days in Kentucky, the PORTAGE was used to pull water from a natural river and stagnant pond. Both locations had considerable water turbidity (cloudiness) and E. coli bacteria before passing through PORTAGE. On the clean water side, E. coli was not detected, and the turbidity had decreased by 99.1%, yielding clear, odourless, potable water. PORTAGE accomplishes this through a series of filtration stages with a minimum screening capability down to 10 nanometers (0.01 micron).
The representatives from the US Army noticed key differences in the operation and effectiveness of the PORTAGE, which demonstrated superiority to the Army’s existing BAT. This led to positive feedback and a pull towards upcoming deployments where PORTAGE will be necessary.
A US Army division receives onsite training and PORTAGE demonstration in January 2022 in Kentucky.
Overwhelming results
“FSC [Forward Support Companies] has spent three days testing [Purafy’s PORTAGE] system against the [BAT], and frankly, it blows it out of the water,” wrote a senior-ranking officer. “The system performs equal to the [BAT] in terms of quality and quantity, it weighs less, it can be thrown around by one or two people, costs less, and is simple enough to enable field expedient repairs. We feel it fills a currently empty niche as a true austere, mobile water purification platform.”
Purafy is now working with another US Army division in Alaska, and continues to work with the division in Kentucky to schedule production of PORTAGE systems and secondary, variable support cases for use alongside PORTAGE in upcoming personnel deployments, humanitarian missions, and partner force training exercises.
A bright future
At Purafy, we are extremely proud of PORTAGE’s robust, versatile, and easy-to-use operating system that drives clean water production. The feedback we have just received from the US Military only motivates our internal engineering goals further toward continued innovations. We now have a direct deployment line for these life-saving products into the diverse operating environments that the military jumps into, whether it be for humanitarian support, natural disaster relief, or in active conflict zones. We plan to use the power this PORTAGE technology gives us to save lives across these diverse operating environments, promoting this feedback and recognition as a key building block that we hope will allow other peoples to gain confidence in the new technology Purafy is bringing to market.
To find out more about the PORTAGE and Purafy’s other water filtration products, head to purafy.com.