Principal Investigator Amos Winter
Project Website http://tatacenter.mit.edu/portfolio/photovoltaic-powered-village-scale-electrod…
The focus of this project is on creating village-scale, off-grid water purification and desalination systems for rural India. Due to the prevalence of chemical contamination in Indian groundwater sources, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have begun to install village-scale reverse osmosis (RO) desalination systems. Tata Projects has developed a sustainable business model for these systems when installed in areas with grid electricity access. However, the capital and operational costs associated with these systems are high and become economically unsustainable in off-grid locations. Our proposed approach is to design direct-drive photovoltaic (PV) electrodialysis (ED) water purification systems appropriate for small-scale applications, which can provide a scalable, efficient, and sustainable solution for clean drinking water. The project will result in new water provision technology as well as the engineering knowledge required to adapt and scale the technology for various environmental conditions and geographic regions. The project includes investigation into methods to reduce the energy required for ED, and thus the number of PV panels required for a given system, in order to reduce cost. The aim is to create off-grid desalination systems that are equal or less in cost than equivalently sized on-grid reverse osmosis systems.