The Mix

Water is an unusual liquid. In warm temperatures, the warmer more buoyant water will rise to the top of a tank and the cooler more dense water will sink to the bottom. In the winter, when water cools to its freezing point, it becomes lighter and floats to the top. As you heat up water from its freezing point, it gets heavier for the first few degrees and is at its densest at 4°C above freezing. It can all seem very counterintuitive! If you decide to use a heater inside your storage tank to prevent ice formation, you will have to overheat the water to make it buoyant enough to float to the top. This will require a lot of extra energy. By combining heating with active mixing, you can actually keep the tank ice-free during the winter and use substantially less energy.

In the water distribution system, cold weather can create risks that are hidden from plain sight: ice accumulation inside water storage tanks. Often, when operators realize they have a problem with ice buildup in their tanks, the tank’s interior is already damaged or the wall is punctured. Additionally, traditional methods for reducing ice formation inside water tanks have been expensive, difficult and often only partially effective.

Welcome to the PAX Water Technologies' Web Log! Four years ago, we entered the water industry with a new approach to product development: biomimicry. Biomimicry is the process of studying natural systems and adapting Nature's best designs to solve engineering challenges. We saw a great fit with the water industry: Nature has been transporting, treating and distributing water since the formation of the planet. And over all those millions of years Nature has developed some ingenious ways of improving process efficiency and saving energy.