Millions of people die each year worldwide from a lack of fresh water. Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have an innovation that could help prevent that—and they’re working with a startup to bring the technology to market.
The “WaterChip” creates a small electrical field that removes salts from seawater using a technique called electrochemically mediated desalination. Essentially, the WaterChip creates conditions that act like a filter, preventing salt from passing through and producing freshwater.
“The availability of water for drinking and crop irrigation is one of the most basic requirements for maintaining and improving human health,” says Richard Crooks, a chemistry professor at UT’s College of Natural Sciences, who invented the device.
Crooks and UT have partnered with Okeanos Technologies, a Louisville, KY-based startup to commercialize the WaterChip. So far, the startup has raised $2 million this year in grants and venture capital from sources including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the state of Kentucky, and Alberto Chang Rajii, founder of Grupo Arcano and one of the original investors in Google. The team plans to have a prototype ready for field tests by early 2014.
The Okeanos device contains a microchannel with two branches. At the junction of those branches, an embedded electrode neutralizes the chloride ions in seawater, which then produces a change in the electric field sufficient to redirect salts into one branch while desalinated water flows into the other branch, resulting in usable fresh water.
If commercially successful, the device could be the first viable alternative to a costly technique that has largely remained the same since the 1950s. The world’s water desalination plants currently use a process called reverse osmosis, which counteracts the natural osmotic pressure, which forces saltwater and fresh water to combine in a receptacle, such as a tank.
The reverse osmosis process pushes the saltwater through a membrane separating the saltwater and the freshwater. The larger salt molecules cannot pass through the membrane, so only water molecules pass to the other side, creating fresh water. The WaterChip doesn’t use membranes, which are expensive.
Tony Frudakis, Okeanos’s founder and chief executive officer, also points out that the device uses less energy to desalinate seawater: 1 watt-hour of energy per liter compared to 4 watt-hours of energy per liter in traditional desalination plants.
“I’m very concerned about Malthusian nightmares,” he says. “Water is where all of the world’s problems start, in my opinion. Water availability determines food availability.”
Only 2.5 percent of the world’s water is fresh water. And nearly 70 percent of that is frozen in glaciers and ice caps.
