Water desalination device

1 in 10 people lack access to safe drinking water. Our solution offers efficient water desalination based on microfluidic/microelectric device.

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Inspiration

More and more people are lacking access to safe drinking water. Seawater desalination in disaster- and poverty-stricken areas where the necessary infrastructures for operating large-scale desalination systems are unavailable.

What it does

Microfluidic chip that desalinates and filters water. It can be used as semi-multiuse microdevice outside civilized areas (50-500 ml/h) or as a module tool in industrial scale (starting from 100 L/h).

How we built it

The microfluidic/microelectronic device will consist of multiple functional polymer layers including cation exchange membranes with integrated electrodes. Saline water travelling through the microfluidic channel will be separated and filtered into drinking water and brine.

Challenges we ran into

1st - Defining application idea & market; 2nd - Understanding physical principles; 3rd - Device design, resolving issues, efficiency increase; 4th - How to make it portable/usable plug'n'play device; 5th - Find weak spots in the idea & resolve them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finding awesome and productive team members / networking. Generating unique solution for an important global problem. Each team member greatly contributed to device designs and application idea.

What we learned

New concept about desalination of water using microfluidics Literature review and idea generation Managing time, effort, skills to solve the problem Addressing product development issues

What's next for Microfluidic Raccoon

step 0: Hackaton step 1: Research in RTU/LU/CFI (eg. Horizon projects) to develop & research microfluidics chip (active element) that produces water that meets World Health Organization water quality standards step 2: Real prototype development & commercialisation start through spin-off step 3: Sell: medium-sized devices (solve the problem in real life) & devices as a module complementary to RO systems step 4: Funds generated from sales or from additional investmentments will drive R&D of large microfluidic block development for industrial scale desalination units & in-pocket microdevice solution for remote poor areas. step 5: be happy

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