MIT researchers have developed a portable salt extraction unit, weighing less than 10 pounds [10 kg], which can extract particles and salts to produce drinking water. A portable device, which requires less power to operate than a mobile charger, can also be powered by a small, portable solar panel, which can be purchased online for as little as $ 50. It automatically produces drinking water above the World Health Organization’s quality standards. The technology is packaged in an easy-to-use device that operates at the touch of a single button.
Unlike other desalination units that require water to pass through filters, this device uses electrical energy to extract particles from drinking water. Eliminating the need for flexible filters greatly reduces long-term care requirements.This can enable the unit to be used in remote and high-resource areas, such as communities on small islands or in cargo vessels. It can also be used to help refugees fleeing natural disasters or soldiers performing long-term military operations.
“This is the end of a 10-year journey that my team and I have been on. We worked for many years with physics after the desalination processes, but we pushed all that progress into the box, created a plan, and showed it to the sea, that was really important and rewarding for me,” said the author. senior Jongyoon Han, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE).
Portable desalination units in commercially available water often require high-pressure pumps to pump water through filters, which is very difficult to make them thin without disrupting the efficiency of the device, explains Yoon.
Instead, their unit relies on a method called ion concentration polarization (ICP), developed by the Han group more than 10 years ago. Instead of filtering water, the ICP process uses an electrical current in the membrane located above and below the watercourse. The membrane expels good or bad particles – including salt molecules, bacteria, and bacteria – as they pass through. The charged particles are placed in a second stream of water that eventually drains out.
The process removes both soluble and suspended solids, allowing pure water to pass through the channel. Since it only needs a low-pressure pump, the ICP uses less power than other techniques.But the ICP does not always remove all the salt floating in the middle of the channel. The researchers therefore combined a second procedure, known as electrodialysis, to remove excess salt ions.
Yoon and Kang used machine learning to find the right combination of ICP and electrodialysis modules. Complete setup involves a two-phase ICP process, water flowing through six modules in the first phase and more than three in the second phase, followed by a single electrodialysis process. “This reduced energy consumption while ensuring that the process is self-cleaning.
They shrink and compact ICP and electrodialysis modules to improve their efficiency and power penetration into a portable device. Researchers have developed a device that is designed for non-specialists, with just one button to start the process of automatic desalination and purification. If the salt level and the number of particles fall to a certain level, the device notifies the user that water can be drunk. .
Beach exploration
After conducting laboratory tests using varying levels of salt water and clouds (clouds), they tested the facility at Boston’s Carson Beach. Yoon and Kwon set the box close to the shore and tossed the feed tube into the water. In about half an hour, the machine had filled a plastic drinking cup with clean, potable water. “It was successful even when it started working, which was very exciting and amazing.
The resulting water exceeds the World Health Organization’s quality guidelines, and the unit reduces the number of solids suspended by at least 10 factories. Their prototype produces drinking water at a rate of 0.3 liters per hour, and requires only 20 watts of energy per liter. .
“In the meantime, we are aiming for our research to increase that level of productivity,” Yoon said. One of the biggest challenges to designing a portable system is the engineering of an accurate device that can be used by anyone, says Han. Yoon hopes to make the device more user-friendly and improve its efficiency and productivity by launching plans to market technology.
In the lab, Han wants to apply the lessons he has learned over the past decade to water quality issues that go beyond salt extraction, such as a quick detection of contaminated drinking water. “This is a very exciting project, and I am proud of the progress. he says. The research was funded, in part, by the DEVCOM Soldier Center, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), the Experimental AI Postdoc Fellowship Program at Northeastern University, and the Roux AI Institute.
READ ALSO : Climate change may trigger the next epidemic, according to a new study
