scholarly journals A compact point-of-use water purification cartridge for household use in developing countries

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajshree A. Patil ◽  
Dilshad Ahmad ◽  
Shankar B. Kausley ◽  
Pradeep L. Balkunde ◽  
Chetan P. Malhotra

Simple, low-cost household interventions are known to be effective in lowering the incidence of waterborne diseases in developing countries. However, high costs along with operational and maintenance issues have prevented the successful adoption of these interventions among the affected communities. To address these limitations, a cost-effective, gravity-driven water purification cartridge has been developed by employing the synergistic disinfection action of low concentrations of silver and chlorine on bacteria and viruses. The silver and chlorine treatment components within the cartridge have been developed using inexpensive materials and integrated with a life indicator and auto-shut-off-mechanism within a compact form factor. The antibacterial as well as antiviral performance of the cartridge was tested by using ground water spiked with Escherichia coli and MS2 bacteriophage. The results show that, although individually, the silver and chlorine treatment systems were unable to inactivate the test strains, the integrated cartridge inactivates both bacteria as well as viruses up to the log reduction requirement of the USEPA guide standard for microbiological water purifiers over its designated life of 2,000 liters.

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajshree A. Patil ◽  
Shankar B. Kausley ◽  
Pradeep L. Balkunde ◽  
Chetan P. Malhotra

Point-of-use (POU) gravity-driven household water purifiers have been proven to be a simple, low-cost and effective intervention for reducing the impact of waterborne diseases in developing countries. The goal of this study was to compare commonly used water disinfectants for their feasibility of adoption in low-cost POU water purifiers. The potency of each candidate disinfectant was evaluated by conducting a batch disinfection study for estimating the concentration of disinfectant needed to inactivate a given concentration of the bacterial strain Escherichia coli ATCC 11229. Based on the concentration of disinfectant required, the size, weight and cost of a model purifier employing that disinfectant were estimated. Model purifiers based on different disinfectants were compared and disinfectants which resulted in the most safe, compact and inexpensive purifiers were identified. Purifiers based on bromine, tincture iodine, calcium hypochlorite and sodium dichloroisocyanurate were found to be most efficient, cost effective and compact with replacement parts costing US$3.60–6.00 for every 3,000 L of water purified and are thus expected to present the most attractive value proposition to end users.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Teusner ◽  
Rhett Butler ◽  
Pierre Le Clech

Fluoride concentrations in drinking water in excess of 1.5 mg L-1 are unsafe for human consumption. To reduce excess fluoride intake, developing countries must use low-cost, point-of-use defluoridation techniques. Although previous work has extensively assessed defluoridation using bone char (BC), most of the advanced studies have been based on the use of fluoridated distilled water as a feed solution. In the present study, BC columns were challenged with a range of model solutions, mimicking various pretreatment options. As a result, the relative impact of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and suspended solids (SS) on the performance of BC filters was assessed. In addition, the performance of a gravity-driven, hollow fibre ultrafiltration (UF) module was examined with regards to the potential for use as a pretreatment option. SS were observed to severely clog the columns and cause the complete cessation of flow. The subsequent removal of SS by UF improved the general filter performance as well as increasing the BC lifetime by 50 %. The UF module achieved a reduction in DOC of 34 ± 6 %, resulting in an additional 30 % increase in the lifetime of the BC column.


2003 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
D J Vassallo ◽  
P Swinfen ◽  
R Swinfen ◽  
R Wootton

The Swinfen Charitable Trust was established in 1998 with the aim of helping the poor, sick and disabled in the developing world. It does this by setting up simple telemedicine links based on e-mail to support doctors in isolated hospitals. The first telemedicine link was established to support the lone orthopaedic surgeon at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed (CRP) in Savar, near Dhaka in Bangladesh in July 1999. An evaluation of the 27 referrals made during the first year of operation showed that the telemedical advice had been useful and cost effective. Based on the success of the Bangladesh project, the Swinfen Charitable Trust supplied digital cameras and tripods to more hospitals in other developing countries. These are Patan Hospital in Nepal (March 2000), Gizo Hospital in the Solomon Islands (March 2000), Helena Goldie Hospital on New Georgia in the Solomon Islands (September 2000), and LAMB Hospital in Bangladesh (September 2000).


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Deepa Dixit ◽  
Virupakshi Soppina ◽  
Chinmay Ghoroi

AbstractAccess to safe drinking water is still a distant dream to millions of people around the world. Especially, people from the low-income group in the developing countries remain deprived of this fundamental right and causes millions of death. There is an urgent need to develop affordable and easy to handle water filter which can provide desired drinking water quality without any electricity. In the present work, a simple and low-cost surface engineered particle (SEP) based filter is developed via alkali treatment of soda-lime-silica particle. The SEP based filter can be used as a portable, non-electric, gravity-driven Point-of-Use (POU) water disinfection system. The developed SEP-based filter is capable to arrest the 99.48% (~2 to 2.5 log10 reduction) of gram-negative bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli OP50) on its surface from the water containing 3 × 108 cells/ml. No bacterial regrowth is observed in the purified water for 12 h. The performance of SEP bed filter is implicated to the nano-scale surface roughness, its distribution along with the surface charge and surface hydrophobicity which are favorable to attract and adhere the bacteria in the flowing water. The observation is consistent over multiple filtration cycles indicating the suitability of SEP based bed filter for POU water disinfection. The SEP surface with 0.05 mM Ag+ loading (SEP+) completely inactivated (>99.99999%) bacteria and protects any bacteria recontamination in the purified water for its long term usage. The strong and effective silver binding property of SEP surface enables very minimal silver loading and eliminates any health hazard due to low silver leaching (~50 ppb) which is well below the drinking water equivalent level (DWEL ≤ 100 ppb). In rural and urban slum areas of developing countries where no water purification system exists prior to consumption, the easy-to-implement and affordable SEP-based gravity-driven non-electric point-of-use water purifier (materials cost ~ 0.25 USD) can be used to protect millions of lives from water borne diseases.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (03) ◽  
pp. 1950028
Author(s):  
SUNEEL KUNAMANENI

Low-cost innovation is increasingly becoming the focus of attention of both firms and policy makers in emerging and transition countries. Previous research has elaborated on the ‘market-based’ view of low-cost innovations captured under various terminologies such as ‘frugal’, ‘good-enough’, ‘resource-constrained’, etc. This study, however, demonstrates that low-cost innovation capabilities are profoundly influenced by the structuring of institutions, particularly the public-science system. The analysis in this paper is structured around innovation in rechargeable batteries in China and point-of-use water purification in India, drawing upon strategies at the Chinese firm BYD and Indian firm Tata, respectively. Both the cases illustrate that diffusion-oriented policies and weak university–industry links played a critical role in firms low-cost ‘incremental’ innovations. However, as regards ‘pre-competitive’ research conducted in the public-science system, with the potential for better performing ‘radical’ technologies at lower costs, the current structure of institutions and firms strategies does not encourage firms to appropriate value from them into innovative output. This has important implications for both firms and policy makers in scaling-up low-cost radical innovations.


2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (23) ◽  
pp. 13901-13908 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beeta Ehdaie ◽  
Carly Krause ◽  
James A. Smith

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina K. Barstow ◽  
Aaron D. Dotson ◽  
Karl G. Linden

Residents of urban developing communities often have a tap in their home providing treated and sometimes filtered water but its microbial quality cannot be guaranteed. Point-of-use (POU) disinfection systems can provide safe drinking water to the millions who lack access to clean water in urban communities. While many POU systems exist, there are several concerns that can lead to low user acceptability, including low flow rate, taste and odor issues, high cost, recontamination, and ineffectiveness at treating common pathogens. An ultraviolet (UV) POU system was constructed utilizing developing community-appropriate materials and simple construction techniques based around an inexpensive low-wattage, low pressure UV bulb. The system was tested at the bench scale to characterize its hydrodynamic properties and microbial disinfection efficacy. Hydraulically the system most closely resembled a plug flow reactor with minor short-circuiting. The system was challenge tested and validated for a UV fluence of 50 mJ/cm2 and greater, over varying flow rates and UV transmittances, corresponding to a greater than 4 log reduction of most pathogenic bacteria, viruses, and protozoa of public health concern. This study presents the designed system and testing results to demonstrate the potential architecture of a low-cost, open-source UV system for further prototyping and field-testing.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (9) ◽  
pp. 5507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uthara S.S. ◽  
Mohammed Basheer ◽  
Anil Babu A.

80% of the epilepsy patients were resides in developing countries. 12 million patients with epilepsy were in India that is One-sixth of the global burden is due to epilepsy. Those diseases were treated properly there is a greater reduction in seizure and people may leads to proper life, if untreated that may become a large increase in burden. Drugs are the main treatment for epilepsy. As compared with conventional AEDs newer drugs are much expensive some newer drugs were 10 to 20 times costlier than older drugs. if those expensive drugs reduce the seizure events, improves the quality of life and with lesser ADRs then the benefit justify the higher cost of the drug. The epilepsy burden can be reduced mainly by giving epilepsy care at low cost, given the lack of expertise in the management of epilepsy in poor areas.


Author(s):  
Peter Anderson ◽  
James Wonson ◽  
W. John Dartnall

Ground-water pumping in remote areas, such as Australian farms, was for many years traditionally done by wind pumps in order to satisfy the needs of stock. Since the 1980’s solar pumps of varying designs have become popular for pumping water from farm dams and tube wells. Wind pumps, solar pumps, engine or electric motor driven pumps and even animal/human powered pumps have a future in many remote situations in the world for stock watering, irrigation and for village water supply in developing countries. In these markets there is a wide-spread view that local manufacture of the pumps is preferable, as is well documented in the literature on village water supply in developing countries. Submersible pumps that are either of the multi-stage centrifugal class or that use the progressive cavity principle have increased in popularity in the low well yield environment. However, where well yields are extremely low the efficiency of these pumps also becomes low and oversized pumps of these kinds are often inappropriately applied. Quite often in the low yield situation, tube wells are also oversized in that they are drilled to large diameters and depths so as to provide storage in order to accommodate the water demand requirements of the user. This practice leads to unnecessary deterioration of both pump and well. Designing for low production volume manufacture presents unique challenges for the designer in attempting to design a robust, versatile but cost-effective product. The design challenges include, achievement of: - high efficiency, reliability, longevity, simplicity, versatility with a minimum parts count, and all this at a low cost. A case study is presented in this paper in which the design issues are outlined. A rigorous design process has been applied in this case study.


2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-248
Author(s):  
Arundhati Pillai ◽  
M. Amin F. Zarandi ◽  
Faten B. Hussein ◽  
Krishna M. Pillai ◽  
Nidal H. Abu-Zahra

Abstract Arsenic contamination of water sources is a global problem, affecting numerous (especially developing) countries across the world. Exposure to exorbitantly high concentrations reaching 400 parts per billion of arsenic in water sources lead to numerous health complications, including the development of respiratory, neurological, and cancerous diseases. This study focused on developing an innovative, low-cost, and gravity-driven filtration system using a novel iron oxide nanoparticle-loaded polyurethane (PU) foam by which people in developing countries may have easy access to an effective, affordable, and easily fabricated filtration system. After successfully synthesizing the new iron oxide nanoparticle-loaded PU foam, effectiveness of the foam was tested by developing a filtration system consisting of vertical polyvinyl-chloride tubing inserted with 10 and 20 cm of PU foams. Samples of arsenic-contaminated water with known concentrations of 100 and 200 ppb were run through each of the systems numerous times for one and five run cases. The system with 20 cm of PU foam and five runs successfully filtered out around 50–70% of the arsenic from the 100 and 200 ppm samples. The filtration process was quite fast (and hence practical) with each run completing in 5–10 minutes' time. Future research is expected to improve this promising start.


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