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Philip Gaffey, Managing Director at Gaffey Technical Services Ltd, gives an account of what his own experience is of “game changing” technology.
I still recall quite clearly the time leading up to our first Patent in 2007 involving vacuuming dosing using a Venturi device at the heart of the system.
“You will never get that to work properly nor reliably. If you wish to dose chemicals accurately you need a metering pump.”
This was the type of comment I often heard when out on client sites with early prototypes, spending hundreds of hours with my colleagues, experimenting with real-time conditions. It was always and still is my belief, you have to carry out such intense work on site as well as in the test room back at the work facility. Otherwise, you would never see the benefit or downfall of a further modification until it might be too late, or it go unnoticed, without any realistic proof in the real world.
Fast-track forward ten years of continuously developing our own methodology in applying vacuum principles in our disinfection systems, we arrived at a significant turning point-in-time.
It was evident that having challenged and championed the use of vacuum technology in our electrochlorination systems, it was time to apply this hard-earned knowledge into developing new chemical dosing technologies not yet present on the market.
Exploiting this knowledge and to use a Venturi device with no moving parts to maintain, hazardous chemicals transferred under vacuum posing little or no danger, no pulsation of chemical feedlines and together with the fact that Gaffey now had the capability of vacuum volumetric dosing accuracy of <1% error, meant that the company was in a great position to further innovate.
In 2017, Gaffey filed a new Patent application where the emphasis was blending and reacting chemicals under vacuum to produce in-situ chemistry, such as chlorine dioxide solutions for example. This product development paved the way to the introduction of our first chloriDOS® iOX® in-situ chlorine dioxide dosing system in 2018. Now an established comprehensive range of capable blending systems, chloriDOS® technology has now achieved and been granted full European Patent status, August 2021.
