An American-Indian Chaitanya Karamchedu from Portland, Oregon found a cheap, easily accessible way to provide clean water from salt water.
He used hydrogel based desalination technique. With the help of saponified starch grafted polyacrylamide’s hydrophilic properties to harvest fresh water. The process does not require any thermal and electrical energy.
What’s striking is that the process has negligible pre-treatment and post-treatment cost.
While testing the mass and conductivity of the treated water, it was found that the water had a total dissolved solids concentration of 513 mg/L which is well within WHO standard at <600 mg/L, compared to 35,000 mg/L for seawater.
“1 in 8 people do not have access to clean water, it’s a crying issue that needs to be addressed. The best access for water is the sea, so 70 per cent of the planet is covered in water and almost all of that is the ocean, but the problem is that’s salt water. Scientists looked at desalination, but it’s all still inaccessible to places and it would cost too much to implement on a large scale” stated Karamchedu.