Solar Water Purifier
8 May 2004
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/innovations/stories/s1102910.htm

When an Australian physicist visited Zimbabwe some years ago he decided that he would develop a useful device that would give small families access to their own, self-made, pure drinking water. Seven years and half-a-million dollars later, he has.
Website: http://www.solarwaterpurifier.com

TRANSCRIPT:

BLANCH : While the western world can turn a tap for quality drinking water, it remains a fact of life that millions of people have only polluted water available to them. When an Australian physicist, John Ward, visited Zimbabwe some years ago and saw for himself the effect of such water on the health and life expectancy of young people in particular, he decided that he would develop a useful device that would give small families access to their own, self-made, pure drinking water. John very quickly realised how difficult it would be to produce a portable, cheap to make and run device which would produce high quality drinking water from virtually any source of contaminated water, but seven years and half-a-million dollars later, he has. The Australian districts of the community service organisation Rotary International have now undertaken to establish processes to deliver the Solar Water Purifier into third world countries and areas that desperately need clean healthy water to sustain life.
So John, your claim is that pure water can be produced from your device from virtually any source of contaminated water, such as?

WARD : A lot of water is available from the ground and when this water comes out of the ground as bore water, very often is has a lot of salt in it and the device which I’ve invented is ideal for removing the dissolved salts – commonly they are things like magnesium sulphate, calcium carbonate which makes water hard, and sodium chloride – these are commonly occurring things in bore water. But one of its main things and this is very, very important I think on a world scale is, it can process sea-water. And this device enables you to remove virtually all of the solids, there are roughly 35,000 parts per million of totally dissolved solids in sea water – that’s 3.5 per cent by weight, and this device changes that solid content down to 1 or 2 parts per million, which is equal to double distilled water. And in such form, you can mix it directly with blood plasma and inject it straight into people – it is as pure as that.

BLANCH : The Solar Water Purifier weighs 8 kilograms and is the size of a suitcase, so what volume of pure water does your device produce daily and from how many litres of impure water?

WARD : The answer to that question is a variable because sunlight is a variable, but on a hot day when the temperature is around about 25-30oC with the sun shining nice and clearly through a blue sky, it produces between about 2.5 and 3 litres per day. The panels at the moment are about a third of a square metre in area, so per square metre -- we’re talking between about 6 or 7 and 9 litres of pure water, per square metre, per day. Now, most people can survive on 1 to 2 litres per day, so under difficult conditions, if you were to dilute the water which was impure to start with, with the pure water which you’re producing, then a whole family could live off one of these devices.

BLANCH : Well, you’ve recently been in Sweden where you presented your Solar Water Purifier, how does your result compare with other systems presented at the conference?

WARD : Well, the fellow before me was a professor of hydrology from Mexico City and he proved conclusively that the maximum yield you can get from a square metre with sunlight at around about 30oC ambient, was about 5 litres per square metre per day. I was the next speaker and I announced that we were getting consistently, under the same conditions, 9 litres per square metre per day. I think you might realise what that means if someone was to double your salary, you’d probably be very pleased with yourself and, I was quite pleased that we were able to almost double what anyone else in the world has ever done. And the reason for this is quite unusual. Instead of acting as a normal conventional still in which you have a cold surface to condense liquids on, you need a hot surface to condense liquids in my device and, if you cool it too much, the whole process stops and we discovered this quite serendipitously, really, and it was pretty exciting at the time. We didn’t understand it, but now we do.

BLANCH : Well, your Solar Water Purifier has no filters, has no electronics, has no moving parts and uses no chemicals, so more on how it works.

WARD : Right. We have a box which is about a metre long and half a metre wide and 0.1 of a metre deep with a glass lid on it. Around the edge of the box is an aluminium frame to hold everything together and inside the box is a piece of black plastic, which is divided up into little square pockets. The water comes in at the top of this box when the box is inclined at 10-12 degrees to the horizontal. It flows down in series through 32 of these little pockets and, when they’re finally all full, you stop the water flowing and the sun shines through the glass window. Now the sun’s got all sorts of different radiations in it – one we’re very familiar with is the ultra-violet light--that’s the one which makes it all brown and red when we go out into the sun, and also, it’s very good at killing germs. And if there are any bacteria or viruses present in the water, prolonged exposure for 2 or 3 hours to the high intensity ultra-violet light in sunlight, is a very good killer of nearly all germs. And what we find is, we can break the DNA bond, destroy the living matter and the water, of course, has not been heated and the infra-red light from the sun heats the water. So the two different radiation bands – One, the ultra-violet light for killing the germs and Two, the infra-red light for heating the water are combined with this special glass window reflects both these regions of radiation come through it and the end product is hot water. The hot water effectively condenses in this square little tray – there are 32 of these in a typical tray – condenses onto the glass surface where eventually a sheet of water is formed and this whole sheet of water then flows down the inside of the glass and the whole process is called sheeting. And sheeting can only take place, if the mechanism which drives this process is called a heat pipe. So each of these 32 trays consist of a heat pipe and what we have created, (we didn’t know we were doing it,) was an array of square section, short-length heat pipes and because of this totally new principle involved, effectively we’ve been able to double, nearly double what anyone else in the world has produced hithertoward. So we’re quite excited about it, we now understand it. I broadcast it to the world at large at an international conference in Gothenburg in Sweden and I had a queue of nearly 200 people at the stand waiting to look at the poster which proved to be so popular, someone stole the poster, and when I reported it to the authorities they said, “Congratulations Mr Ward, someone wanted it more than you did”.

BLANCH : And I think you’ve just explained why the water doesn’t evaporate.

WARD : That’s right.

BLANCH : What starts the unit operating, is it heat, again, from the sun?

WARD : If you put it into the sun it takes time – 20, 30, 40 minutes to get going, however what you can do if you’ve got it available is put hot water in it to start with and then it begins almost straight away.

BLANCH : John what’s your reaction to Rotary Australia picking up your device and running with it?

WARD : Absolutely fantastic! I just love Rotary for doing what they’ve done. I am not a Rotarian because I’m not sufficiently reliable to do the regular thing for which they require of their members, however the fact that they do humanitarian things such as the Salk virus for polio and now they’re buying some of these Solar Water Purifiers and giving them to third world countries, and they far surpass in every way, as far as I’m concerned, any actions taken by the South Australian or the Australian Government who effectively have given me no support at all and Rotary have been absolutely top-of-the-tree and I cannot say enough good things about it.

BLANCH : They would surely require increased numbers, how is manufacture, is that up to scratch?

WARD : Now then, that’s a problem. The present method for manufacturing these things involves a process called ‘vacuum forming’ which is necessarily a bit slow and a bit expensive and to make the jump from something being vacuum-formed to something which is what they call injection-moulded, cost quite a lot of money – around about $AUD1 million. And this would lower the cost considerably to the user and long term, I’m hoping we’ll be able to do that and we’re currently negotiating with a government-sponsored private company to get sufficient money to enable us to do this. The money will not be a gift, the money will be a loan – we’ll have to pay interest on it and we’re not really enthusiastic about the lack of support, which so far we’ve been given by any government in Australia.

BLANCH : A casual remark made to Rotarian Peter Rostron at a Rotary meeting in Adelaide where John Ward was the invited speaker, led to Rotary taking on the Solar Water Purifier to distribute in countries around the world. So Peter, from that casual enquiry of yours to John about his various inventions, one of which was the Water Purifier, you now find yourself running this project, so how does Rotary plan to get these devices to the people who need them most?

ROSTRON : Desley, the money to pay for each of the units is supplied or raised by the many Rotary Clubs in Australia. They then donate the units to our Save Water, Save Lives Committee who decide where these units will be placed. Now, at the present time, we have 50 units in the Solomon Islands, which are being used in conjunction with the Rotarians Against Malaria Program and they’re supplying freshwater--clean pure water to the laboratory assistants. Our next phase of the project is to send a batch of these to Nigeria where the need for fresh drinking water is paramount. So, we are currently working with two different districts within Nigeria to undertake delivery and installation of a quantity of purifiers.

BLANCH : So the Rotary Clubs in those countries will be involved in installing them or issuing them, is that how it’s going to work?

ROSTRON : Yes. Rotary Clubs will be invited by their district governors who are working closely with me, to deliver these to the people they feel need them most and they will then take the responsibility of making certain that people are trained in their use, and then supplying feedback to us on the results of the purifiers. And, might I add that each unit that goes out of Australia has an aluminium plaque attached to the side of it, saying who donated the unit, which club or which district and, we then hope that the recipient will make contact with that club and create a friendship in that way.

BLANCH : Has the whole project been embraced enthusiastically by your Rotary members?

ROSTRON : We have been able to achieve by the use of a business card-size CD-Rom, we have got the information out to the 523 district governors throughout the world, so they all aware of the project and it is now being pushed by most of our district governors here in Australia.

BLANCH : So it’s possible that you could have clubs on the other side of the world coming to you for these purifiers?

ROSTRON : In fact Desley, we have received numerous enquiries at this stage from places such as Ecuador, Canada which surprised us, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as other overseas countries.

BLANCH : Rotarian Peter Rostron, chairman of the Solar Water Purifier Project, but I leave the last word to John Ward.

WARD : My original thought was totally based upon humanitarian views which I’ve got and I wanted to cater for individual families, living under very poor conditions with effectively no money, barely living from day to day, having no access to electricity or a government-organised reticulated water system, so I thought I’d start at the very bottom end with a family that might need around 10 litres of water per day, of pure water which wouldn’t give them any more diseases than they’ve got already. So my target I think, has been achieved. It’s something which is portable, it has a handle on it just like a suitcase, you can set it up in any sunny location, you can fill it with bore water, sea water, urine, effluent, radio-active water and drink with equanimity what comes out of it.

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