Concrete That Filters Stormwater

Most porous pavement solves one problem. It simply lets water pass through it. A layer of gap-graded aggregate, a few large voids, and stormwater passes straight from the surface to the ground below. That's useful for reducing puddling, but it does almost nothing to treat what's flowing through it, and it does nothing to slow it down. Water goes in, water comes out, largely unchanged and on its own schedule.

AquiPor was built to do something structurally different. Our porous concrete additive was engineered around a metal-binder chemistry with sub-micron pore structure. It doesn't just let water pass through, it captures it, filters it, and releases it on a controlled schedule.

The Chemistry Behind It

The underlying science draws on the same principle that's kept Roman marine concrete intact for two thousand years: a pozzolanic reaction, creating covalent bonding between aggregate and cement rather than the looser mechanical bond in conventional mixes. We've applied that same chemistry logic to modern porous concrete, using a near net-zero porous “additive” that integrates into standard concrete manufacturing — dry cast, precast, or pour-in-place — without changing standard manufacturing processes.
The result is a matrix with engineered, sub-micron pores, and that internal surface area is what makes real filtration and flow control possible.

Fast In, Slow Out: The Peformance That Changes the Game

The clearest evidence that AquiPor isn't behaving like ordinary permeable pavement shows up in the flow numbers themselves.

Surface infiltration rates can exceed >10 in/hr., meaning water disappears from the surface quickly — well above the rate of even a heavy storm event — so there's no ponding, no sheet flow, and no standing water on the pavement surface.

But the rate at which water actually exits the bottom of the material and re-enters the ground is dramatically slower. With a release rate of 1.36 in/hr, that's roughly an order of magnitude slower than the surface intake.

That gap between intake and release is the whole point. Conventional pervious concrete allows water to flow through the material very quickly. What comes through the surface exits the bottom at roughly the same rate, because it's just a network of open channels. The problem is that these voids get clogged up with stormwater contaminants and sediment very quickly, and the material is brittle.

AquiPor's sub-micron pore structure creates water retention, so the material temporarily holds water within itself and acts as a distributed detention cell across the entire surface — before releasing it back to the ground at a rate the surrounding soil can actually absorb.

For site design, that's the difference between a material that manages puddles and a material that manages hydrographs. It attenuates peak flow, spreads discharge out over time, and reduces the burden on downstream stormwater infrastructure, all without a separate detention vault.

Third-Party Water Quality Testing

Fast infiltration and slow release only matters if the water is also getting cleaner while it's in there. AquiPor has been independently validated on that front through third-party testing, most recently with Evergreen StormH2O, and the results describe genuine filtration performance rather than simple mechanical straining:

~97% removal of Total Suspended Solids (TSS) — the baseline particulate-load metric most stormwater Best Management Practices (BMPs) are measured against.

~81.6% removal of 6PPD-quinone, the tire-wear-derived compound increasingly implicated in urban stormwater toxicity to aquatic species, and a pollutant most conventional pervious systems aren't designed to address at all.

99% removal of dissolved zinc, from our most recent round of third-party testing — a meaningful result given that dissolved metals are typically the hardest fraction of stormwater contamination to capture, since they don't settle out mechanically the way particulates do.

Removing a dissolved metal at that rate isn't something a sieve can do, no matter how fine the mesh. It requires the pollutant to actually interact with the material. The same sub-micron structure that slows water down and turns AquiPor into a detention unit is also what gives it the residence time and surface area to pull pollutants like dissolved zinc, TSS, and 6PPD-quinone out of the water column.

It Still Has to Perform as Concrete

None of this matters commercially unless the material also holds up as a structural product, which is why we've paired the water performance testing with independent materials testing. Our most recent structural data comes from Budinger & Associates, tested per ASTM C-140 (Standard Test Methods for Concrete Masonry Units) on 4"x8"x2" Holland paver units manufactured with AquiPor. With compressive strength exceeding 6,000 psi and absorption exceeding 11.2%, AquiPor does not trade off porosity for strength.
Hitting compressive strengths in this range on a paver engineered for sub-micron porosity and controlled water retention is the structural proof point behind the water performance data above — a detention-and-filtration material that doesn't have to give up load-bearing performance to do its job.

Putting It Together

Rapid surface infiltration prevents ponding. Controlled sub-surface exfiltration turns the pavement into a distributed detention system rather than a straight-through channel. Sub-micron porosity gives the material the surface area and residence time to filter out TSS, 6PPD-quinone, and dissolved zinc at rates independent labs have now confirmed. And ASTM C-140 testing confirms the material still performs structurally as concrete.

Individually, those are four separate engineering wins. Together, they're the case for a different category of product entirely: not permeable pavement that happens to filter a little, but a stormwater detention and treatment system that happens to be poured as pavement.

Third-party water quality testing conducted by Evergreen StormH2O. Structural testing conducted by Budinger & Associates per ASTM C-140, June–July 2026.