Bubble size is an economic variable.
Nano Bubble Oxidation Technology, written for the person who will be asked to defend it in a technical review.
Gas utilisation is the whole argument. A coarse-bubble diffuser is a magnificent machine for moving gas from a cylinder to the atmosphere by way of some water, and the water gets whatever the transit did not claim. On a large volume that fraction is small, which is why conventional aeration scales by adding power rather than by adding cleverness.
Below roughly a micron the accounting changes. Buoyancy no longer governs the bubble, so it does not simply rise and vent. A negative surface charge — the literature puts oxygen nanobubbles somewhere around −34 to −45 mV — keeps neighbouring bubbles from coalescing into large ones that would. And subdividing gas multiplies the interface it presents far faster than it consumes the volume, so the same cylinder now meets the water across an enormously greater area.
One published measurement carries the commercial case. Work in Science of the Total Environment on nanobubble aeration recorded a gas–liquid mass transfer coefficient about eleven times higher than conventional bubbles delivering the same gas volume.
Eleven times is the difference between equipment that has to be built into a site and equipment that can be driven to one.
What the stage actually consists of
- Read Nothing is dosed before the water is characterised. Temperature, conductivity, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity and organic load, taken at the point of treatment rather than from last year's file. Organic load is the one that matters most commercially, because it is what consumes oxidant without producing a result.
- Select the gas Oxygen where the fault is a deficit. Ozone where the fault is a load. A blend where it is both, which is more often than operators expect. On a contracted programme the gases sit inside the service rather than becoming a procurement exercise for your team.
- Shear In-line generation into the sub-micron range. Get this wrong and you have built a very expensive coarse-bubble diffuser, which is the failure mode most of this category shares.
- Place the contact Into the layer or the section of circuit that carries the fault. Treating the top metre of a stratified reservoir in August is decoration; the shortfall is at the bottom and that is where the gas has to arrive.
- Hold the limits Oxidation is bounded by dose and residence, monitored live, with the ceiling set by the water chemistry rather than by the throughput we would like.
- Log it The same parameters, on the same schedule, after the pass as before it. The log is a deliverable in its own right, because that is what your regulator and your auditor will actually read.
Fresh against saline
Two water types, two sets of limits.
This distinction matters more here than anywhere else in the family, because one skid can be on a reservoir in March and an intake approach in June.
Bromide is the reason. In fresh water there is not enough of it to change anything, and an oxidative stage is governed by organic load, contact time and whatever the receiving environment will tolerate. Seawater and brackish groundwater are different: ozone goes after bromide roughly eighty-three times harder than chloride, the hypobromite that follows can convert to bromate, and bromate is a regulated concern rather than a footnote.
The controls are not mysterious. Bromate formation tracks ozone concentration, contact time, pH and temperature. Hold the first two down, keep pH low, or dose ammonia or hydrogen peroxide, and formation falls. The caveat we are obliged to attach is that every one of those measures also costs disinfection efficiency.
So it is a trade-off, operated per site against a measured background, and written into an operating log that a regulator can read without a translator.
| Parameter | Fresh duty | Saline or brackish duty |
|---|---|---|
| Oxygenation | Unchanged — transfer physics is the same | Unchanged — transfer physics is the same |
| Governing limit on oxidation | Organic load and contact time | Bromate formation potential |
| Live monitoring | Dissolved oxygen, turbidity, organic load | The same, plus ozone residual, pH and temperature against the bromate ceiling |
| Typical assets | Reservoirs, amenity lakes, lagoons, cooling and process circuits | Intake approaches, discharge fields, port basins, brackish sources |
What has actually been demonstrated, by somebody who is not us
In September 2018 NOAA's National Centres for Coastal Ocean Science published a validation of an ozone nanobubble aeration system run on an eight-acre pond near Fort Myers Beach, Florida. Algae eliminated inside 48 hours. Reoxygenation handled properly, and no apparent harm to the aquatic life in the pond.
Two years later, NCCOS-affiliated testing under a cooperative agreement put a commercial nanobubble ozone system through a ballast water duty. It was found highly effective against algae, bacteria and motile zooplankton, and the receiving-water organisms showed no statistically significant adverse residual toxicity.
Both are real, independent and directly relevant to what this stage does. Neither names Fluid Nano and neither names Alarivean. The 2018 release names a system called NABAS. The 2020 release is the one to read slowly, because it is a trap for the careless: it names a technology abbreviated NBOT, and the partner on the cooperative agreement is the American Marine University Research Institute. NBOT there stands for Nanobubble Ozone Technology. We abbreviate Nano Bubble Oxidation Technology exactly the same way. The letters coincide. The parties do not.
We are pointing that out ourselves because somebody in this sector will eventually paste a NOAA logo next to those four letters and hope nobody expands the acronym. Both releases establish that the approach works and can be run without wrecking the receiving water. They establish nothing about our equipment on your site.
Alarivean's own record here is a permit, not a portfolio. Florida DEP issued permit FLOA00062 in September 2024 for a red tide mitigation field trial, documented separately by the Sarasota Bay Estuary Programme and by the Florida nonprofit START. Permission to test is not evidence of scale, and the estuary programme has said publicly that open-water performance remains unproven. Both of those are correct.
What gets lost in the second one is the offer folded inside it. That programme put technical support into the permit application and kept its money out, which is a deliberate distance, and it would like to be the party holding the instruments when open-water work is finally measured — so that anything endorsed past the bay rests on its readings rather than the operator's. The operator wants the same arrangement for the same reason. No evidence has been published in either direction. That absence is a job of work, not a verdict.
Three things we cannot close out
Radical chemistry. Ask ten suppliers whether nanobubbles generate hydroxyl radicals and you will get ten confident answers. The literature is not confident. Moleaer and Arizona State University reported reactive oxygen species, hydroxyl radicals among them, from injected nanobubbles in 2020; three years later a controlled study by Chae, Kim, Kim and Fortner in ACS ES&T Engineering found generation minimal at best under the ambient conditions tested. We build the case on transfer and on a metered oxidant instead, because those two survive a reviewer.
Bromate on saline duty. The controls are known and the efficiency trade-off is real. It is a live operating parameter carrying a monitoring obligation, not a box already ticked.
Scale. Every independent validation of this technology class is pond-sized or tank-sized. A three-hundred-hectare reservoir, a live condenser circuit and half a kilometre of open intake approach are three different engineering problems, and none of them is an eight-acre pond in Florida. Closing that distance on your water, before capacity is committed, is the entire function of a calibration run.
Sources cited on this page
- NOAA National Centres for Coastal Ocean Science — Nanobubble technology validated for remediation of harmful freshwater algal blooms, 26 September 2018.
- NOAA National Centres for Coastal Ocean Science — Nanobubble ozone technology shown to safely eliminate invasive species in ballast water, 1 July 2020.
- Science of the Total Environment — Mass transfer of nanobubble aeration and its effect on biofilm growth.
- Chae, Kim, Kim & Fortner — Reactive oxygen species generation from nanobubbles, ACS ES&T Engineering, 2023.
- Springer — Nanobubble stability and zeta potential.
- Ozone: Science & Engineering — Bromate formation in seawater ozonation.
- Sarasota Bay Estuary Programme and START (Solutions To Avoid Red Tide) — public documentation of FDEP permit FLOA00062, 2024.
Questions we get asked
Straight answers
Does anything join my chemical inventory?
No. The working input is gas — oxygen, ozone or a blend — conditioned on site and delivered as sub-micron bubbles. Nothing to store, nothing to reconcile against a second chemistry, nothing left over at the end of a run.
Can you give me a performance percentage for my cooling loop?
No. There is no published figure for this duty on a circuit like yours, and anyone offering one before they have read your make-up chemistry, metallurgy, load profile and current programme is quoting somebody else's site back at you.
A bounded run against your own fouling indicators, with the failure condition agreed in advance, is the only number that will go in writing. Slower to sell. Shorter list of unhappy clients.
Does the chemistry change between my reservoir and my seawater intake?
The oxygenation does not. The oxidation does, and bromide is why. Fresh water has too little of it to matter. Seawater and brackish groundwater have enough that ozone will find it roughly eighty-three times faster than it finds chloride, and the hypobromite produced can go on to bromate.
On saline duty, dose and residence stop being settings and become monitored ceilings.
Do nanobubbles generate hydroxyl radicals?
The literature disagrees with itself, and we would rather tell you that than pick the flattering half. Moleaer and Arizona State University reported reactive oxygen species including hydroxyl radicals in 2020. A controlled 2023 study by Chae and colleagues in ACS ES&T Engineering found generation minimal at best under ambient conditions.
Neither result is priced into a Fluid Nano programme.
Has anything like this been tested by somebody independent?
At pond scale and tank scale, yes. NOAA's coastal science centres validated an ozone nanobubble aeration system on an eight-acre Florida freshwater pond in 2018, and separately assessed a nanobubble ozone ballast water system with no statistically significant adverse residual toxicity in the receiving water.
Neither names Fluid Nano or Alarivean. The 2020 one does use the initials NBOT, for Nanobubble Ozone Technology, with a different institute as partner. We use the same initials for Nano Bubble Oxidation Technology. Check the expansion, not the acronym.
Sources: NOAA NCCOS, 2018 · NOAA NCCOS, 2020
Does the asset have to come out of service?
No. The stage arrives alongside a running circuit, or floats on a body of water that stays in use. Nothing is drained, lined or isolated for our convenience.
If you already have an outage booked we will happily work inside it. We will not ask you to create one.
Two questions to open with
Ask about bromate. Then ask about the eleven.
Those are the two places this account is most exposed, which is why they are both on the page above rather than in a meeting-room caveat. Send the water chemistry with your first message and the answer can be specific about both.