A Fayetteville startup company has landed a $1,099,000 U.S. Department of Defense contract to develop technology to destroy explosives.
CatalyzeH20 has received the DOD contract through the U.S. Army and will be developing technology to destroy explosives, including Trinitrotoluene (TNT) and Royal Demolition Explosive (RDX), in water.
The company is led by chief executive officer and co-founder Shelby Foster. Dr. Lauren Greenlee is the also a co-founder and its scientific advisor.
“At CatalyzeH2O, we are designing a compact system with a regenerative catalyst to destroy the energetic compounds over long periods. Our technology will require less capital investment than the biological treatment technologies, and will destroy energetics on the spot compared with activated carbon technologies that just remove the energetics,” Foster said in an interview with the Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center.
According to its website, CatalyzeH20 specializes in water filtration and munitions detection and degradation. In 2018, CatalyzeH20 received a Phase I SBIR/STTR grant of $99,998.20 to develop “covalent organic frameworks based nanoporous structures for explosive remediation.”
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