EnWave Announces quantaREV, A New High-Capacity Dehydration Technology Platform, And Files Patent

EnWave Corporation recently announced the launch of quantaREV, the Company's fifth Radiant Energy Vacuum ("REV") dehydration technology platform, designed to meet the requirements of food and chemical production companies for high-volume continuous, low-temperature dehydration of solids, liquids, granular or encapsulated products. quantaREV technology introduces a continuous belt design within a controlled vacuum-microwave environment, allowing the potential for dehydration of up to several tonnes of material per hour, a significant innovation in EnWave's REV dehydration technology.

"While all of our REV technologies are designed to increase the speed of dehydration, improve the quality of the final product and reduce costs, we believe quantaREV will provide a compelling solution for those industrial users requiring high through-put drying of heat-sensitive materials such as nutrient-rich foods or foods where colour, flavour or texture could be improved," said Dr. Tim Durance, EnWave's Chairman and Co-CEO. "If, as we believe, we can achieve tonnes per hour in REV drying capacity with quantaREV, it will open many new highly attractive markets for our technology. It is also of interest to several companies with which we are currently working. High volume REV technology may compete successfully with other large-capacity drying technologies, or be used as a new technology to deliver new or improved food and chemical products to the market."

"Our growing list of multi-national collaborations is an indication of how exceptionally well positioned we are to bring our proprietary industrial dehydration technology to market," said John McNicol, EnWave's President and Co-CEO. "We know that there is a global need for high-volume dehydration and, with the addition of quantaREV, we now have platforms that may be used to compete with all three major forms of commercial dehydration: freeze drying, spray drying and air drying."

EnWave recently completed tests on a prototype of this technology in its engineering facilities in Delta, B.C., and has filed a patent to protect this innovation. The Company is now constructing a larger, pilot-scale version of quantaREV for installation in its pilot plant, and expects the unit to be available for paid customer trials in the first quarter of 2011.

EnWave's new quantaREV dehydration technology uses a continuous belt design in a vacuum-microwave environment in order to accommodate a wide range of input materials. quantaREV will complement EnWave's current suite of dehydration technologies which include nutraREV, a commercial technology used for drying discrete food pieces in a tumbling vacuum-microwave environment, and powderREVTM, an accelerated freeze drying process currently being tested as a means for bulk drying of biomaterials such as probiotics and enzymes. The Company also has two other prototype dehydration technologies, bioREVTM and freezeREVTM, both of which are designed to dry biomaterials in vials such as vaccines and other biopharmaceuticals, scientific reagents, and medical diagnostic materials.

SOURCE: EnWave Corporation