Major New Product Announcement

You may put away your pencils and notepads. You won't need them anymore to measure fine bubble diffuser pressure. You won't need the bicycle pump to blow out the lines, or the portable control box that you have to wheel out to each junction box, either. We have changed the way we are going to measure diffuser pressure and airflow, forever.

Below is a diagram from the 1989 Fine Pore Aeration Manual. Most aeration companies still sell a version of this system 30 years later. There are 3 taps - one to the pipe, one just under the membrane in the diffuser housing, and one left open at the diffuser elevation.

This is how you set up this type of system, which contains two panels, analog gauges, and a bicycle pump. Bring the control panel to the junction box, hook it up to the junction box, which is mounted on the handrail, and take the bicycle pump and blow out the bubbler line. Read the two differential pressure gauges, jot down the values on a notepad, and try to locate the O & M manual for the aeration system in your office. It's probably in a binder in the room with all of the drawings. Take out the table for the PMS, correct for temperature, and then cross-reference the orifice differential pressure reading you took with the corresponding airflow rate. Do that for each junction box. Got a headache yet?

Here is how it works with the new SSI Digital PMS. Mount a single box on a handrail, connect it to your existing taps, and you are ready to go. The system runs on solar power, which works rain or shine, and the battery will get you through when the sun goes down. Once installed, either wait a few seconds for an automatic reading or press the red button to request an immediate reading. Moments after pressing the button, you will hear two solenoid valves click. Then the lines begin to purge themselves - the bubbler gets a burst of air, and the line and diffuser blow out and drain.

Next, you see the panel light up with values. You can get the raw data from the digital sensors, but the default output provides the calculated differentials across the orifice and membrane, and the calculated airflow rate across that orifice, corrected for temperature. The system comes with a low bluetooth (BLE) transmitter, and in the future, we will provide an app with a dashboard, to enable users to walk around the plant collecting and plotting data, and saving historical values.

Here is a quick demo of the system under test in one of our labs. Note we have tested multiple diffusers with different orifice sizes at different airflow rates, and the values align with our traditional differential pressure gauges and flow meters to within a few%.

This product is now available in limited quantities for beta testing at wastewater plants. Please let us know if you are interested in trying one. We have kept the same tubing diameters as we use on our analog PMS, so existing SSI clients will be able to upgrade to digital PMS directly. If you have a different brand of PMS and would like to try this, we will try to accommodate you, but supply is limited at this time, so our priority is to serve existing SSI clients first. Contact us here.

(Please note that this product is covered under US Patent #9,678,091 and WIPO WO2016049401A1)