MIT researchers build ground-breaking 'desal' unit that makes salt water drinkable
The American engineers who travelled to rural India two years ago believed they were going to help poor villagers get rid of microbes in their drinking water. But soon after their arrival, they began hearing about a different problem: salt.
"People kept talking about the salt in the water," recalled Natasha Wright, a doctoral candidate who was part of the team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology that made the journey in 2013. "The groundwater beneath the villages was brackish."
Those complaints inspired new technology that could some day supply water to thirsty villages and drought-stricken farms in other parts of the world.
While there are dozens of different desalination systems in use around the world, MIT's is uniquely designed to be small, relatively cheap and 100 per cent solar-powered, making it suitable for remote areas where the electricity supply is unreliable or non-existent, Wright said.
The panel of judges last month deemed the machine's potential so impressive that they gave the inventors the US$140,000 "Desal Prize", an award sponsored by Securing Water for Food, a joint project of the US Agency for International Development and the governments of Sweden and the Netherlands. Some 68 engineering teams from 29 countries competed in the contest, hosted by the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation.