Indigenous solar water-purifier, jacket unveiled

New Delhi, March 14 (IANS) Union Environment and Science Minister Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday unveiled a solar water purifier and a solar jacket developed by Department of Science and Technology (DST) indigenously.

Offficials said that so far five prototypes of solar water purifiers of 500 litre capacity and 20 prototypes of the solar jacket customised for the Forest Department staff and others have been developed.

"One prototype has been installed here, while the other four prototypes of the solar water purifiers are installed at four different schools in Tripura and Assam, where electricity couldn't reach due to difficult terrain," innovator Prof S.P Gon Chaudhury, from DSE, told IANS.

The 4-watt powered water-proof solar jacket, that comes in camouflage pattern, has solar panels at its rear side and a battery attached inside, to help charge mobile phone and GPS. Beside a LED powered torch on the front and a illuminated ID tag were attached to help the movement of the forest officials during foot or night patrolling.

The solar-jacket, Chaudhury said, had been under trial for past six months and were distributed among the forest staff in Tripura and officers of Kolkata Police.

"The price of this jacket is about Rs 4,000 while the water purifier costs about Rs 35,000... the cost would come down with increase in demand," Harsh Vardhan said, adding that approximately 4.7 million hours are lost each year due to illnesses caused by consuming contaminated water.

The DSE's solar water purifier, the minister said, is ideally suited for village schools, primary health centres and tourist lodges where conventional electricity is very erratic or not available.

How this young entrepreneur was a double winner for his ideas

They say farmers are the best at solving problems other farmers encounter in their everyday work and that was certainly proven by some of the new innovations exhibited at the National Ploughing Championships in September.

A total of 69 Irish companies were picked from 150 entries to exhibit their brainwaves in the Enterprise Ireland Innovation Arena at the three-day event under the watchful eyes of potential customers from all around the world.

Of these, eight were spinout research projects, 11 were established companies and 45 were new start-up entrepreneurial led exhibits. The total prize fund this year was in excess of €70,000 including a top prize worth over €15,000 for the most innovative start-up.

Entries varied from a solar powered water pumping system to a water treatment machine that reduces the need for antibiotics in poultry flocks.

Some of them made the grade and won awards, while others that didn't, received the publicity they need to get on the road to success.

The overall award went to Solar Pump Solutions founded by Bryan Davis who also picked up the young innovator award.

The company based in Co Tipperary provides solar powered water pumping systems across Ireland and the world. Their pumps can operate in any remote location, pumping water at high pressure without needing access to electricity.

These solar panels that can pull clean drinking water out of the air just got a big boost

Cody Friesen, CEO of Zero Mass Water.Zero Mass Water

Zero Mass Water makes solar panel arrays that pull clean drinking water from the air.The $4,500 arrays just launched in the United States.Zero Mass arrays could come in handy in areas where water sources are far away or scarce. Some homeowners have purchased arrays as an alternative to plastic water bottles.

Around the world, approximately 2.1 billion people do not have immediate access to clean drinking water.

A sustainable water startup called Zero Massaims to make clean water easily accessible to more people around the world. In 2015, itlaunched its first product, Source - a solar panel array that harvests and filters water from vapor in the air - in eight countries, including Chile, Jordan, and Peru.

Source is now available in the United States, CEO Cody Friesen, a material scientist and MIT alum, told Business Insider.

Each panel costs $2,000 (plus a $500 installation fee) and generates an average of two to five liters of water daily, depending on humidity and sunlight. Source can work anywhere, and many arrays are deployed in deserts where water is scarce, Friesen said.

Comprised of proprietary materials, the panels use sunlight to produce heat, which allows them to collect water vapor from the air. Friesen wouldn't disclose what the materials are, but said they have an ideal binding energy for humidity.

Source panels on a home in Scottsdale, Arizona.Zero Mass Water

The harvested vapor is sterilized and turned into a liquid. The device adds minerals to increase the water's pH levels (to make it taste more like bottled water), and it's stored underneath the panels in a reservoir that can hold 30 liters. Lastly, the water travels from the reservoir through a pipe to a faucet.

The arrays are customized based on the customer's needs, Friesen said. A typical Source for a home has two panels, while a school in Mexico City with 50 students has 10 panels. If a two-panel array harvested five liters of water daily, it would be enough for a family of three (if everyone followed the US Department of Health and Human Services' consumption recommendation).

To make sure everything is working properly, Zero Mass tracks the Sources' outputs using sensors installed in the arrays. The team is studying data points, like pH levels, temperature, and humidity, to maximize the amount of water each array produces and to improve future iterations of Source.

When asked about who Zero Mass' ideal customer is, Friesen said "everyone." The company has installed Sources everywhere from multimillion-dollar mansions in California to an orphanage in Lebanon. Duke Energy has also deployed panels in Ecuador, and Zero Mass received a USAID grant to install panels in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon in 2015. In an Arizona desert, the company recently put a system that pumps water at night for wild animals.

A Source array for wildlife in an Arizona desert.Zero Mass Water

When you compare Source's price to the cost of buying bottled water, the former is more affordable and sustainable over time. On the other hand, boiling poor-quality water to sterilize it is almost free. For those in low-income areas, Sources are pricey and would likely need to be bankrolled by humanitarian nonprofits.

Friesen added that maintaining the device is low-cost. Air filters need to be replaced every year, and mineral blocks need to be replaced every five years. (Both cost just a few dollars.)

"We want to perfect water for every person and every place," Friesen said. "Although I feel sheepish saying something that bold, I feel confident since the technology is [deployed] across a huge range of places and the fact that it's the best water you can get, it's independent of infrastructure, it's CO2-offsetting, and it pays back really quickly. The ultimate goal is for people to have a fundamental change in their relationship to water and have total independence around it anywhere on the planet."

Zero Mass boasts that one Source is able to produce enough clean drinking water

Our atmosphere contains approximately 3,100 cubic miles of water — enough to cover the entire planet in one inch of water.

That water surrounds us in the form of vapor — water’s gaseous, evaporated state. We’re usually only reminded of this on especially humid days, but our air can actually be considered a water source.

Zero Mass, a sustainable water startup, is trying to create an easy, off-grid way for anyone to harvest that liquid with its first product, Source.

Each Source unit looks like a solar panel resting on top of a metal box. Company CEO Cody Friesen, a material scientist and engineering professor at Arizona State University, says the device essentially uses sunlight to produce electricity and heat, and which allows a set of proprietary materials to passively catch the humidity in the air.

Friesen won’t say how those materials are engineered or what they're made of, but explains that they’re designed to have an ideal binding energy for water vapor.

He compares the process to the grains of rice you’ll sometimes find inside salt shakers in humid locations. That rice, he says, is placed there because it binds more strongly to water than the salt does, so the moisture will stick to the rice, and won’t make the salt wet and clumpy.

“You want to make sure that these materials that are going to passively absorb water from the air hold onto that water strongly enough that they’ll do so under dry conditions, but not so strongly that under any condition it takes a lot of energy to get that water back off,” he says.

Friesen says that on average, one Source device can harvest 5 liters of water per day. Because of the device depends on solar power, he says, that number doesn’t vary too drastically between dry and wet climates — solar radiation is stronger in dry places where there are fewer water molecules in the air to absorb it, and water vapor is more prevalent in wet places where solar radiation is less intense.

Once the water vapor is harvested and turned into liquid, the device adds minerals to bring the water’s pH levels up, which makes it taste more like the water sold in bottles. It then gets stored in a metal compartment underneath the solar panel that can hold 30 liters. The reservoir gets connected to a pipe, and sends the water from the device to a faucet.

"W hen you're making solar energy, you have to use it or lose it unless you have a battery," Friesen says. "In our case, we're storing solar energy in a glass."

Zero Mass boasts that one Source is able to produce enough clean drinking water each day to satisfy a family of four; however if all four members followed the 8-glasses-per-day rule, that family would wind up about 3 liters short. The panels can be connected, however, to combine their outputs. When that happens, Zero Mass programs one to act as the hub, and when that hub uses up the water in its reservoir, it can communicate with the other panels, which act as spokes and sent their water over.

The Source isn’t available for retail sale yet — Friesen says he expects sales to start in early 2017 — so the company hasn't released a cost estimate for individual units. But Zero Mass suggests one device will pay itself off in bottled water savings over two to four years. In other words, each one would be equal to what you'd pay for somewhere between 964 and 1,928 gallons of bottled water at a store like Costco or Walmart. (By our math that would price it somewhere between $1,000 and $4,000 dollars.)

Several countries and organizations have already started putting the devices to use. In August 2015, Jordan’s King Abdullah II installed Zero Mass panels in locations throughout the country. Duke Energy has installed panels in schools, homes, and a clinic in Ecuador, and the Zero Mass earned a USAID grant to deploy panels to refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon.

Zero Mass’ products seem especially promising for emergency situations, since they are 100% sustainable and don’t require and electrical inputs. Though other companies are also devising ways to extract water vapor from the air — Israeli company WaterGen has a similar technology — many require electricity to run.

Zero Mass estimates that because they don't need to be hooked up to a home's electrical system or to a power grid, the panels only take about 20 minutes to install. That allows the product to easily brought to places where populations don’t have access to clean drinking water, like rural communities in the developing world or make-shift refugee camps. Source units could also be deployed to help Californians weather the state’s drought, or to provide residents of places with polluted water, like Flint, Michigan, with an alternative source.

“One of the fundamental tenants [of the business] is that drinking water is a human right and everybody should have access to it and control over it and security over it the same way we have those things around air,” Friesen says. “It shouldn’t be something that you have to secure through a government source, through infrastructure, or by purchasing water at the store.”

The Source, of course, is not designed to provide enough water for an entire family’s total daily usage (the average American uses about 100 gallons per day). Rather, it ensures that a moderate supply drinking water is always clean and available — something that's currently not the case for 10% of the world’s population.

“We are taking an inexhaustible source of water — vapor — and we’re making it free to make it liquid,” Friesen says, adding, “From a technology perspective, of course, we are moving as fast as we can, because this is no joke.”

You’ve already heard of solar panels that can sustainably provide energy, but what about an ultra-high tech solar panel that can provide doubly-pure, twice distilled water for a family of four, out of thin air?

by Christina Sarich
Underground Reporter

(UR) Jordan — You’ve already heard of solar panels that can sustainably provide energy, but what about an ultra-high tech solar panel that can provide doubly-pure, twice distilled water for a family of four, out of thin air?

A new start up company called Zero Mass Water that won’t rely on outdated municipal water with decaying pipes full of lead to deliver water to the ‘middle billion’ and under-served people lacking clean drinking water in the world. It will create it with solar panels and a technology that capitalizes on moisture in the air.

The company’s tag line is ‘drinking water democratized,’ and it certainly seems to stand for the exact opposite world view of, say, Nestle, which has been stealing water from people and San Bernardino National Forest reserves and then selling it back to people in plastic water bottles. Zero Mass Water can deliver clean water to people in the poorest nations, with no need for piping or complicated water plants. The solar panel itself is smaller than a traditional air conditioner and can be placed in remote areas with ease.

The United Nations claims that more than 783 million people currently lack clean drinking water and more than 6 million people die annually from water-borne disease. They also claim that, with population growth, we can expect a 50 percent increase in water demand; but they haven’t accounted for simple technologies which can make use of millions of gallons of water using clean, sustainable, and even simple technologies. The demand for water could also easily be met by practicing better water harvesting, catchment, and filtering.

Zero Mass Water joins other breakthrough technologies like the “Drinkable Book” and experimental wastewater filters, which are trying to bring water to every corner of the world.

A blog post from Duke Energy, a partner in Zero Mass’s project claims the water purification system doesn’t need an outside source of energy, so it can be placed were infrastructure is damaged or non-existent.

At a recent installation in the coastal city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, a medical clinic was able to enjoy clean water for the first time without having to haul it in with trucks — an expensive endeavor. Though it rains frequently in Ecuador, there is little potable water.

The project has targeted an even larger area for humanitarian aid — water-generating solar panels are being placed in Jordan. The company claims the panels will help Syrian refugees in the country, possibly aiding 200,000 people, who currently have no access to clean drinking water.

If Zero Mass Water is successful in a war-torn area, their solar panels might also be perfect for the 5,300 cities across the U.S. who have been drinking lead-contaminated water due to crumbling infrastructure and a political elite who have been unwilling to replace old pipes with new ones, along with expensive water filters on municipal supplies.

When the sun can bring you energy, and drinking water, there is little need for poverty, ill-health, and reliance upon aging government and corporate structures. This invention truly could democratize water for the planet.