The Prior Art Project
Ideas belong to everyone. These are mine — take them.
I've been inventing things my whole life. Some became patents. Others became products and businesses I watched other people build — sometimes because I shared too freely with people I trusted.
So I'm turning that problem inside out. This is where I publish my ideas openly, permanently, and free for anyone to use. Every idea here is also filed as a defensive publication with a timestamped DOI — which makes it prior art, so no company, no troll, and no bad actor can ever patent it and lock the world out. Not even me.
If you can build something on this page, build it. Improve it. Sell it. Give it away. You don't owe me anything but a fair shake for the next inventor. Now go and make the world a better place. — Ernest N. Sumrall
Point-of-Generation PFAS Capture and Destruction for Manufacturing Emissions
Published July 22, 2026 · Zenodo · DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21482617 · License: CC BY 4.0
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are released as gases and aerosols during many manufacturing operations — fluoropolymer processing, semiconductor fabrication, metal plating, textiles, and specialty chemicals. Once emitted, their carbon–fluorine chemistry makes them effectively permanent in the environment, and Western manufacturers now face converging regulatory pressure from the U.S. EPA's PFAS Strategic Roadmap, 2024 national drinking-water limits, CERCLA hazardous-substance designation, and the European Union's proposed universal PFAS restriction.
Nearly all current PFAS treatment investment targets water that is already contaminated — part-per-trillion concentrations in enormous volumes. This disclosure describes the opposite approach: intercepting PFAS at the manufacturing stack, where concentrations are highest and volumes smallest, and destroying them on site before release.
The disclosed system integrates five proven principles into a single retrofit-ready treatment train: (1) point-of-generation gas capture under negative pressure; (2) fine-bubble scrubbing and foam fractionation that exploit the surfactant character of PFAS to concentrate airborne compounds into a minimal liquid volume; (3) closed-loop hydrodynamic cavitation — driven by a pump drawing suction from the low-pressure collision chamber and discharging into the high-pressure chamber — which strips dissolved oxygen, disrupts PFAS aggregates, and contributes a secondary interfacial destruction mechanism; (4) an ultraviolet/sulfite advanced reduction reactor, in which UVC irradiation of repurposed industrial waste sulfites generates hydrated electrons, one of the few chemical species demonstrated to cleave the carbon–fluorine bond; and (5) fluoride mass-balance verification with zero-release residuals management, so that destruction means mineralization rather than transformation into short-chain compounds that evade detection.
The paper provides the full design basis: stage-by-stage engineering, a reference sizing sketch for a 10,000 Nm³/h emission stream at skid scale, instrumentation and control philosophy, safety requirements, an honest comparison against supercritical water oxidation, plasma, electrochemical oxidation, and incineration, and a research agenda naming what remains unproven. Every component is commercially available today.
This document is published as a defensive disclosure. I dedicate the described methods — including the closed-loop cavitation configuration, the cavitation-before-sulfite sequencing, and the fluoride mass-balance interlock — to the public, so that no party may obtain exclusive patent rights over them and any manufacturer, anywhere, may build, improve, and commercialize this system without license or permission.
Sumrall, E. N. (2026). Point-of-Generation PFAS Capture and Destruction for Manufacturing Emissions: An Open Technical Disclosure for Industry (v1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21482617