For decades, the goal of membrane science has been to achieve "high specificity at low energy." By building pores with atom-by-atom precision, levels of fine tune control in filtration have been combined with the low energy of a one-atomic-layer-thick membrane to reach that goal.

Agua Via uses a different paradigm from standard water treatment technologies. Instead of asking, What contaminants need to be removed from the water?, the technology is based on providing the desired product water and eliminating everything not included in the specification. This biomimetic principle mimics the way the kidney functions. The kidney has a simple rule: keep what is vital to life and throw out everything else. What is most desirable in potable water, for example, is to completely throw out the arsenic, the pharmaceuticals, the pesticides, bacteria, viruses, etc. and keep only the salts and select minerals vital to life. 

Following the kidney’s paradigm, the pores that form our membranes produce what is desired in the product water, and throw out everything else. Although there are hundreds of thousands of potential contaminants, the number of desired product water definitions and desirable solutes is small. We turn to the library of pores to make a choice of the pores to use in a particular membrane to provide the desired product water. This takes the complexity of dealing with the 500,000 or so potential contaminants in water, and turns it into a simple and solvable problem.  

We call the paradigm Full Spectrum FiltrationTM because the membrane removes the full range of contaminants from large to small in a single filtration pass. Instead, standard systems employ “stacked solutions” to deal with different contaminants. In California, for example, some venues now require three separate systems to deal with arsenic, boron and nitrates. Or, a delicate Reverse Osmosis membranes needs to have a Microfiltration membrane protect it from fouling.  The approach taken by the Agua Via membranes is to eliminate all contaminants across the full size range and deliver only the desired product water. 

Some pores are built to keep earth salts, and we call those Purification pores. Pores built to eliminate salts as well as other contaminants are called Desalination pores. But they all follow the same paradigm of delivering only the desired product water.

So the question is: what is your desired product water? Potable water? Deionized water? Semiconductor water? A special definition? Just select the right pore or pores to construct your customized membrane.