Water
Capture, clean, reuse.
Water systems are designed as circular processes, not linear utilities. In Heliphere systems, there is no wastewater - only water at different stages of reuse.
The problem
Water systems collapse when supply chains do.
Municipal networks and bulk transport cannot be assumed in remote, disaster, or off-grid environments. Water becomes a limiting resource.
Research focus
Water as a managed loop.
- Advanced purification and filtration (membrane + electrochemical)
- Atmospheric water capture for arid or disrupted regions
- Closed-loop recycling of greywater and blackwater
- Operation on brackish, saline, or irregular sources
Inside the loop
Six streams, one quality gate.
Water is the heaviest thing a habitat consumes and the most expensive to truck, pipe, or launch — yet a day's use is fully recoverable in principle. Heliphere treats water not as one utility but as six distinct quality streams, each with its own treatment chemistry, converging on a single potable hub — the ~98% closure standard the ISS already proves, designed into standardised containers for any site on Earth.
The water loop reference architecture. Collection and recovery sub-loops (top row) treat each stream with its own chemistry, then converge through the greywater works on the potable hub — the hard quality gate every litre passes before it reaches a tap. Brine from source capture is reduced to dry minerals in the brine-and-minerals module, and electricity is drawn once for clarity — every sub-loop draws from the energy loop.
~98%
of ISS water is recovered and reused — the closure standard Heliphere designs to
~2.3 L
leaves each person daily as breath and sweat — near-distilled water, recoverable as condensate
3.6–28 L
per person-day — from survival ration to full hygiene and laundry service (NASA BVAD)
50,000 L
of drinking water a day from seawater — 20ft containerised RO is proven at sea today
System connections
No wastewater — only water at different stages.
Every output of the water loop is an input somewhere else. Mineral concentrates, hydrogen, and processed water are not waste products — they are feedstocks for materials, energy storage, and biological systems.
- → Food — clean irrigation water and dissolved nutrients delivered at the root
- → Energy — hydrogen from electrolysis returned to energy storage
- → Materials — mineral concentrate from purification as inorganic aggregate feedstock
- ← Air — condensate from humidity management recovered and returned to the loop
- ← Food — transpiration vapour recaptured via the air system and returned
- ← Energy — continuous power for membranes, pumps, and electrolysis cells
Shipped as standard modules
The water loop in 20ft boxes.
The reference architecture packs each water sub-loop into standardised 20 ft ISO containers — one physical interface, one control plane, combined and sized to suit the site.
HW-01
Source Capture
Seawater and brackish RO train with energy recovery, atmospheric water generator, rain-catchment conditioning skid with first-flush diversion and UV, media pre-filtration, transfer pumps, and CIP system.
HW-02
Potable Hub
Low-pressure RO and ultrafiltration polishing, remineralisation dosing, UV plus chlorine-residual and electrochemical disinfection, ~10 m³ potable reserve, distribution pumps, per-branch metering, and acoustic leak detection.
HW-03
Greywater Works
Screening and grit removal, membrane bioreactor with aeration blowers, ultrafiltration, granular activated carbon polishing, UV disinfection, and backwash and sludge-wasting systems.
HW-04
Blackwater & Biogas
Vacuum-toilet collection interface, macerator, screw-press solids separation, heated mesophilic anaerobic digester, H₂S biogas scrubber and gas buffer, and digestate filtration with UV polishing.
HW-05
Nutrient Recovery
Urine collection and stabilisation tanks, struvite precipitation reactor, MBBR nitrification stage, ion-exchange columns, activated-carbon pharmaceutical polishing, UV, and a concentrate packaging and dosing station.
HW-06
Brine & Minerals
Mechanical vapour recompression brine concentrator, crystalliser, salt dewatering and bagging station, and a condensate return line to the potable hub — closing the loop's last liquid discharge.
structurehidden detail (x-ray)envelope / keep-outplan view · 20 ft HC ISO · concept design
Development focus
Closing the water loop on any source, anywhere.
Membrane Filtration
Reverse osmosis, nanofiltration, ultrafiltration
Advanced membrane systems purify water from brackish, saline and contaminated sources without consumable chemical treatment. The focus is on low-energy membranes, fouling resistance and integration with closed-loop water management for continuous operation.
Electrochemical Purification
No chemistry, no cartridges
Electrochemical treatment systems disinfect, remove dissolved contaminants and recover minerals without chemical dosing. These systems operate continuously from electrical power, eliminating scheduled consumable replacement and the logistics dependency that comes with it.
Atmospheric Water Capture
Harvesting water from air
Desiccant materials, condensation surfaces and thermoelectric cooling extract water directly from ambient humidity. These technologies provide a water source in environments with no surface, ground or piped water access — critical for arid, remote and disaster-response deployments.
Greywater & Blackwater Recycling
Full loop closure from every source
Biological and physical treatment systems return wastewater from sanitation and washing to potable or irrigation quality. Closing the blackwater loop eliminates the largest volume of water waste in any occupied facility and completes the water cycle within the system boundary.
Desalination
Ocean and brackish sources as primary supply
Low-energy desalination approaches — including forward osmosis, capacitive deionisation and pressure-retarded osmosis — are a key focus. Research targets systems that can operate from renewable and nuclear energy sources at the small scale required for off-grid and remote deployments.
Electrolysis & Hydrogen Production
Water as an energy carrier
Water electrolysis systems produce hydrogen for long-duration energy storage and oxygen for the air loop. The water loop and energy loop converge here — surplus power is stored as hydrogen, and hydrogen combustion or fuel cells recover both energy and water simultaneously.
Zero-liquid Discharge
No waste water, only minerals
Concentration and crystallisation processes reduce brine streams to dry mineral solids. The outputs — calcium, magnesium, silica, and salts — become feedstocks for the materials loop. Zero liquid discharge means the water loop produces no waste at any stage of the process.
Smart Water Monitoring
Continuous quality intelligence
Distributed sensor networks provide real-time monitoring of water quality, flow, pressure and chemistry throughout the loop. Continuous monitoring enables automated treatment responses, prevents quality failures before they propagate, and provides the data foundation for optimising water use across all connected systems.
Beyond Earth
The same loop, off Earth.
On the Moon and Mars, the source-capture sub-loop loses every natural input — no rain, no meaningful humidity — and is replaced by ISRU ice mining from permanently shadowed lunar craters and Martian subsurface ice, whose output needs its own treatment train, including perchlorate removal on Mars, before it may touch the potable hub. Closure targets climb from ≥80% at remote Earth sites to ≥99% on the Moon and effectively 100% on Mars: all six treatment sub-loops become mandatory, the daily water balance must close to within half a percent, and leak detection is promoted from efficiency metric to safety-critical alert. Reduced gravity rewrites the physics the hardware is built around — sedimentation, bubble behaviour in bioreactors, pump sizing — and space configurations add ISS-heritage flows such as Sabatier CO₂-reduction water, with N+1 to N+2 redundancy on every potable-critical stage. It is why the reference architecture is designed to be proven on Earth first, on the same control logic it would carry off it.