Clean Water Technologies Hack Chat

September 3, 2019 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Join us on Wednesday, September 4th at noon Pacific for the Clean Water Technologies Hack Chat with Ryan Beltrán!

Access to clean water is something that’s all too easy to take for granted. When the tap is turned, delivering water that won’t sicken or kill you when you drink it, we generally stop worrying. But for millions around the world, getting clean water is a daily struggle, with disease and death often being the penalty for drinking from a compromised source. Thankfully, a wide range of water technologies is available to help secure access to clean water. Most are expensive, though, especially at the scale needed to supply even a small village.

Seeing a need to think smaller, Ryan started MakeWater.org, a non-profit program that seeks to give anyone the power to make clean water through electrocoagulation, or the use of electric charge to precipitate contaminants from water. There’s more to MakeWater than electrocoagulation kits, though. By partnering with STEM students and their teachers, MakeWater seeks to crowdsource improvements to the technology, incorporating student design changes into the next version of the kit. They also hope to inspire students to develop the skills they need to tackle real-world problems and make a difference in the lives of millions.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, September 4 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Collaborative Water Purification

May 16, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 63 Comments

Look over any description of a water treatment plant, and you’ll find a description that includes the words, ‘coagulation tanks’. What are these treatment plants coagulating? You don’t want to know. How are they doing it? With chemicals and minerals. Obviously, there’s something else that can be done.

For their Hackaday Prize entry, [Ryan], [designbybeck], [Clint], [Wanda] and [Maker Mark] are investigating electrocoagulation. It’s an alternative to a frothy brew of chemicals that uses electricity to pull pollutants out of the water.

Right now, the tests are much smaller in scale than the tens of thousands of gallons you’d find at a water treatment plant. In fact, the test rig is only a 16-ounce mason jar. While this isn’t large enough to precipitate pollutants out of a household water supply, it is big enough for a proof of concept.

The team is using two electrodes for this build, one aluminum, and one iron. These electrodes are connected via alligator leads to the electronics board they’ve built. This electronics board is basically just an H-Bridge (used so they can reverse the polarity of the field emitter and prevent a buildup of gunk on the electrodes) and a few connectors to a power supply. The results are encouraging; they have a few time-lapse videos of a mason jar of dirty water clearing up with the power of electricity. It’s a great project with some great documentation. The team already has a bunch of updates on their project and instructions on how to replicate their hardware. You can check out those videos below.

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