His ‘Weird’ Invention Cleans Up Water
Nature’s way of recycling water gets some wet and wild twists in machines Bill Williamson builds to clean up hazardous wastes for industries ranging from nuclear power to perfume.
“There’s a whole new science that we’ve got to learn,” said Williamson, 74, who has been experimenting with evaporation and condensation since World War II, when he developed machines that distilled seawater aboard warships.
Williamson, a mechanical engineer, turned his attention to fighting pollution 14 years ago when he and his sons, Bruce and Rod, founded the small but fast-growing Licon Inc. in Pensacola.
“We are doing some weird things. Some smart physical chemists, when they see what we are doing, they just throw up their hands,” he said.
Licon produces evaporators that clean up waste water and let industries concentrate and reuse toxic metals and chemicals that once went down the drain into the environment. Some plants that use the machines don’t even have sewers.
The evaporators, with a patented heat exchanger, operate at relatively low temperatures, high efficiency and low cost, said Rod Williamson. They can treat waste water for 1 or 2 cents a gallon compared to as much as 12 cents for other machines and up to $2 for disposal in a hazardous waste dump, he said.
One is being tested at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant; NuPac Services plans to use it to decontaminate 2.3-million gallons of water irradiated in the 1979 accident that shut down the Harrisburg, Pa., plant.
Licon evaporators, which cost $14,000 to $250,000, are in use in the United States, Canada and Europe. Most are in metal plating plants, although one is cleaning up shampoo wastes at an Alberto Culver plant in Puerto Rico.
Customers can be found in nearly any industry that produces liquid hazardous waste, but there are limits, Rod Williamson said. Some industries, including paper mills and chemical factories, produce too much waste water to be efficiently treated with evaporators now being produced, he said.
Bill Williamson, who holds 30 patents, said the key to the machines is low air pressure. When boiled, even fresh water leaves a scale, although the residue is much worse with salt water or waste water and would quickly foul and corrode a conventional evaporator. He said he discovered that heating water in a whole or partial vacuum, thereby lowering its boiling point, would reduce the scale and permit recovering specific salts for reuse. The machines also reuse heat the way a heat pump improves a home heating and air conditioning system.
Bill Williamson began working on desalination while employed by Maxim Silencer Corp., which specialized in equipment to muffle diesel engines. It was asked to develop a way to purify salt water aboard Coast Guard cutters so that they could escort convoys in World War II. The cutters were too small to carry enough fuel and water to cross the ocean, but could make the trip if water storage areas were used instead for fuel oil, he said.
The company rented a beachfront house at Clinton, Conn., to test the machine. Its resemblance to a moonshiner’s still prompted neighbors to call the police. At first, officers who raided the place didn’t believe the machine was producing nothing stronger than water but, “They looked at it and tasted it and said ‘OK,’ ” Bill Williamson said.
He later worked on similar equipment for nuclear submarines and in 1970 helped set up a desalting test station near the Florida Panhandle resort town of Destin for Mechanical Equipment Co. of New Orleans.
Williamson and his sons then formed Licon, short for “liquid conditioning” or “liquid concentration,” and built its first evaporator in his garage out of pipe fittings and other parts they bought or made.
