Desalination Pack

Last crawled date: 1 year, 10 months ago

This design solves the problems that the other solar stills have with time of production of potable water . The solar stills holding tank, where the salt or dirty water would sit is 18 inches by 18 inches by 2.5 inches this equates to a holding capacity of 2.5 gallons. This can be scaled to fit the 10x10 inch build space of the 3D printer. This scaled version will produce less then what the current design can. The 2.5 gallons of fresh water it would produce is the standard amount of water a five person family should drink every day. This was designed for poor costal and other drought ridden areas in the Middle East and Africa. But this also can be used to produce more potable water here in the U.S.A also. This amount of people was part of the design, most families in villages where this would be in use are around five people, more than one can be used for an entire village. The next design feature of the pack, is that it is made to be transportable by humans. It is roughly the same size as a standard backpack that a college student carries around. This transportability was a very key design feature, because I wanted to make movable if the users had to leave where they were living for any reason, but they still would be able to take a tool to make safe water with. With the transportability issue there are straps attached (not shown) like a backpack to it and also the legs fold to make it easier to carry. The biggest innovation of our design is the pyramidal top which is made out of lenses instead of the traditional glass/plastic. The use of lenses will not just let light pass through, but it will magnify the solar rays. This magnification will heat the water to a boil/evaporation faster than the traditional way, which will cut the time to collecting the 2.5 gallons significantly. Depending on conditions it could turn many more gallons of undrinkable water into drinkable water per day. Lastly, the benefit of time comes with this design, half or more of the day for women and or children are used up in the search for safe water. This system only needs to be set up and filled up, with any water and that is it, this gives those who search for water the time to improve their own lives by letting them go to school, or have time for them to do things that they enjoy.
This design can be produced using a 3D printer with exceptional material savings compared to a more traditional of making it out of metal of solid plastic. Almost all the parts can be printed with the exception of the lenses, which would be lenses from a scraped flat screen T.V. (Fresnel lens).