Is this the end to water woes?
IISc has validated an water purifier promising unlimited water supply, if popularised
What if there is a technology applied on a large scale that generates millions of additional litres of potable or useable water from different sources (not just Cauvery or any river, but even from sewage water or waste water) to meet the growing demands of common people from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu?
A test project focussing on water purification at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is promising just that – the availability of “an unlimited amount of water” to the masses. While desalination continues to pose a challenge, large-scale electrical water purification can ascertain a steady and uninterrupted supply of clean, potable and irrigation-worthy water. The department of instrumentation and applied physics at IISc has come up with a technology that purifies water hassle-free, and which can potentially be used by the common man.
On a larger scale, they have a sewage treatment plant within the IISc premises where the department’s researchers have applied the same technology to generate 1,000 litres of drinking water per day, and which they are looking at scaling up to 2,000 litres per day.
Assistant professor Dr Sanjiv Sambandan at the department, who heads OpenWater.in, a spinoff from the department’s flexible electronics laboratory, told Bangalore Mirror that the technology aims to make water treatment and wastewater management hassle-free. The idea is to apply the technology on a significantly wider scale to ensure steady water supply for all categories of water use.
“The main aim is to ensure that each common man is able use the system by himself so he can just use even waste or sewage water and obtain clean, drinking water, or even water that can be used in irrigation,” he said. The model that OpenWater is using has a capacity of just one litre; it takes about 20 minutes to convert the adulterated water into clean usable water.
The patented electric water purification (using battery power) ensures absolutely no water wastage; no membranes used in filtration, therefore ensuring minimal maintenance; no chemicals, which makes it safer and easier to handle by the layman; an environment-friendly process; no requirement for a clean room to fabricate the devices; and complete removal of all totally dissolved solids.
Sambandan said, “The process runs on a filtration system that works on electric fields. We apply an electric field, and all the particles that are dispersed inside – nano-particles or micro-particles – get polarised. Different particles get polarised to different levels; but all get polarised as they attract each other and try to form clusters because of forces acting on them.” A battery is plugged into the filter to generate an alternate current voltage which creates the electric field in the water. This clusters the totally dissolved solids even at nano- and micro-particle levels, which are then removed, rendering the water absolutely clean – even potable. OpenWater.in is also collaborating to procure water samples of Ganga and groundwater samples from surrounding regions for a rigorous quality analysis of various contaminants.
OpenWater.in is being funded by Big BIRAC (Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council), the Department of Biotechnology, Robert Bosch Centre for Cyber Physical Systems, Center for infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning (CiSTUP), and the Centre for Innovation, Incubation & Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM)-Ahmedabad.