AquaHubs

PurOceans Technology – for harmless removal of oil products and micro-plastic from the polluted floors of any waterbody around the Globe

The Company

PurOceans Technology is a Latvian startup within the CleanTech industry, established in 2019. Founded by a team of 5 members, with 35 years of combined experience in oil-contaminated sediments, microbiology, ichthyology, and civil engineering. 15 years of combined entrepreneurial experience, and 15 years ofcombined experience ininternational sales, project management, and product development.

Our mission is to clean up waters and seabeds from oil products and micro- plastic around the World. PurOceans team aims to rehabilitate deep waters and restore/recover Dead zones (over 500 areas around the World), as well as restore historically polluted areas from oil products and micro-plastic.

Technology

The pioneering, eco-friendly technology that performs sophisticated water bottom cleaning in the most cost / time-efficient way, providing a positive impact on the environment. PurOceans can clean up floors of the water bodies from oil, oil products, microplastic, and chemical sediments without:

•  Mechanical intervention / excavation of soil
•  Electrochemical treatment
•  Chemical substances

How it works

Unlike the competitors, our technology doesn’t use the mechanical excavation of soil, electrochemical treatments, and other unsafe solutions. All it uses is the micro flotation effect, which is caused by the air being pumped down to the bottom of the water body, where the pollutants are located.

The pumping is performed through the submersible assembly, which is required to be lowered until the “umbrella”-like ending covers the treated area. Once the “umbrella” is positioned – the operator begins to infuse the air down to the bottom, where the bubbles of air start to swirl, make vortexes, and break down the molecular bonds of the hydrocarbons under high pressure. That is required to make the sizes and the weight of the particles as small as possible, to let the buoyancy force do its job.

While the “umbrella” concentrates the air at the bottom of the waterbody, the molecules of oil, microplastic, and other pollutants stick to the molecules of air, and due to the aforementioned physical effect of the buoyancy force (*air is less dense than water, hence, is forced up), bubbles of air start to float up to the surface, and drag all the hydrocarbons together.

The securing arm (Fig.1.), that connects the top part of the submersible assembly with the “umbrella” – isolates the lifted sediments from spreading around by the sub-flows of the moving waters, and makes sure that none of the pollutants escape the treated territory. Once the hydrocarbons reach the surface – they are safely collected either by skimmers, or by sorbents, and stored until it is handed over for the utilization.

During the operation, the PurOceans floating machine must be constantly surrounded by one or two types of floating booms (Fig.2.) to prevent the spread of the lifted hydrocarbons in an uncontrollable manner. The floating booms are keeping the pollutants within the controlled territory, and once the bottom sediments are cleaned up – the surface area is being cleaned too.

Our advantages

The key advantages of our technology can be explained as follows:

•  Extensive use – possibility to eliminate the pollution from waterbody’s floor on the depth of 25 meters (with the possibility to extend up to 200 meters depth)
•  Cleaning efficiency – proven results: 98% of water/floor purification
•  Eco-friendly solution – no chemical/mechanical intervention
•  No adverse effect – no damage to flora & fauna in any way

However, the main advantage – is the easy way of utilization. It is like that because we lift pollutants only. The pollutants mostly are oil, oil products, or microplastic. Any of it can be handed over to the refinery, and refined into something usable.

It is considered one of the most sensible advantages, simply because once the port operators decide to perform dredging – the utilization costs will be dramatically lower due to an absence of hydrocarbons in the sand.

Nature

Amongst the economic benefits, PurOceans Technology also improves the environment, flora, and fauna.

It’s well known that once the layer of oil reaches the bottom – it completely locks and isolates the means of feeding for the fish. Hence, the inhabitants of the waterbody begin to starve or mutate due to poisonous substances, the algae can’t produce oxygen, and eventually, the territory becomes a dead zone.

The specifics of PurOceans technology lays within its very main operation – by infusing air – it doesn’t only remove the pollutants, it also boosts the development of the underwater life, it stops the hypoxia of the waterbody, it mixes the layers of water, and eventually, it stabilizes the flora and fauna in the region.

General information

Contact: Rolands Grigorjans
Phone: +371 29106267
Email: roland@puroceans.com
Url: www.puroceans.com

Goal of the IE

The purpose of the IE was to increase understanding of how the estimation of existing fish stock (type and quantity of fish) can be automated and made more accurate. To this end, we sought to complement sonar data with underwater video, in order to automatically identify the type of fish, and eventually estimate the size of fish stock in the body of water.

Description of the IE

Strong fish stocks, good water conditions, and quality of fish products are all prerequisites for a viable fish economy and for increased use of local fish. Sustainable fishing is also good for the body of water, because it helps to remove nutrients, and hence reduces eutrophication. The increased use of local fish is also hoped to improve the business opportunities for fish primary production. Competitive and predictable operative environment would enable sustainable growth of fish primary production and would attract new firms and capital to the field.

Being able to maintain strong fish stocks and to predict the amount and type of fish to catch requires new technological solutions. Up to date, estimation for fish stocks have been created with two primary ways:

•  Exploratory fishery is currently considered the most reliable method for estimation. However, the reliability of this method has been questioned, with the main argument that different fish species may behave in different ways and the results are not then generalizable in a reliable way.
•  Professional fishery. In this method, estimations of existing fish stocks are created on professional fishermen’s reports of caught fish. The main challenges of this method are that the estimations are created on past data and that many of the lakes do not have professional fishermen.

These methods have room for improvement in terms of cost-efficiency, accuracy and use of digital technologies. Using new technologies, however, is not a straightforward task. This is why we decided to focus on exploring technological opportunities for automating the estimation of fish stocks.

Objectives of the IE

•  To explore technological opportunities to gather data of fish stocks (particularly sonar, underwater drones, and underwater cameras)
•  To explore real-life challenges of gathering data
•  To determine workable methods for data gathering
•  To evaluate the quality and usability of gathered data for automatic recognition of type of fish.
•  To develop Proof-of-Concept for automated estimation of fish stock.

Challenges addressed by the IE

Some of the known challenges related to fish stock estimation are:

•  Sonar does mainly give data about quantity of fish, not type of fish
•  Fishing business is currently too unpredictable. Consumers are unsure what fish and what quantities will be available.
•  Fishermen do not know what type of fish and how much can be caught in a sustainable way, and without harming the viability of fish stock.
•  There are not enough data currently to maintain viable fish stocks in a sustainable way, and vice versa not enough real-time data for fish stock management, e.g to estimate the need of removing low value fish species
•  Granting permits for professional fishing could be made easier if there would be reliable data showing the viability of fish stock in the body of water.
•  There are not enough reliable ways of estimating existing fish stocks in the body of water.

Stakeholder group

Researchers, fishing economy development organizations, officials responsible of water body maintenance, commercial fishermen, fisheries administration, officials planning for responsible fishery management and fishing, policy makers, certifiers of sustainable fishing

Goal of the IE

The goal of the project is to develop the technology which will enable users to analyze the protein, glycogen, fat and moisture levels in oysters with the accuracy/prediction rate higher than 0.95 rate (r2) and with the prediction errors which do not exceed 0.4% values.

Description of the IE

For many working in oyster farming or further down its supply chain, delivering the most fresh, highest quality and food-safety compliant oysters to their respective customers is key to lasting business success. Solutions that can be implemented on-site – in the operational environment – are especially needed, as they could help farmers assess oyster quality, growth conditions, evaluating potential risks and operational planning both at oyster growing and harvesting stages, as well as performing oyster quality and freshness monitoring and preventative screening down different supply chain stages. The approach chosen to address this market lack is the development and innovation of an oyster quality assessment service that utilizes NIR spectrometry in combination with machine learning and advanced data analysis techniques. The end result will be a service for rapid on-site assessment of oysters, where a customer opens a single oyster from a batch, ‘scans’ its flesh and receives results on its (and by extension the remaining batch) quality parameters.

Objectives of the IE

•  To develop and adapt near-infrared spectrometry (NIR), machine learning technology and data analysis techniques to oyster farm needs and requirements.
•  To demonstrate the above-mentioned approach in an operational environment.
•  To validate and assess the impact of our IE to the oyster farm sector.

Challenges addressed by the IE

Currently oysters are being analyzed for their levels of biotoxins, heavy metals, diseases and bacteria, quality of oyster flesh, water content, concentration of proteins, fats and glycogen. Measurements of these parameters are mostly done using a range of different conventional, laboratory-based methods that are limited in their industrial applications by being time-consuming, low-throughput and costly. Therefore, many attempts have been made in the development of various fast, high-throughput and low-cost methods for analysis of some of the aforementioned oyster parameters on-site. Scientific effort has been previously made, mainly, in the field of visible and near infrared reflectance spectroscopy applications. Scientific studies demonstrate that the moisture, protein and glycogen in oysters can be predicted in higher than 0.92 rate (r2). This indicates that the models built on NIR reflectance spectroscopy are sufficiently accurate and reliable for quantitative applications.

Stakeholder group

Oyster farmers, Resellers, Wholesalers, Logistic companies, Consumers