3D Printed Water Purification - Let's Work Together

[Brian_Krassenstein]

Les Hall is a man who always said he wanted to 'make the world a better place.' Well, he may have found a way to do this. Hall has uploaded a 3D printable water purification device to Thingiverse, and is asking the community for your help in improving his invention. There are currently 783 million people in the world who lack access to clean drinking water. That's 783 million too many. Please feel free to download the Thingiverse model and make changes, then either post them here, discuss them, or upload your own to design Thingiverse.

Thingiverse link: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:464463
More details on Les and this Invention: http://3dprint.com/15917/3d-printed-water-purification

Video of Les:

[emaeye]

This is a wonderful idea, incredibly simple and definitely something worth creating.
That said, we can all see the obvious problems: it collects very little water and it's a bit difficult to manage. The trouble with making the collection part of the ring any wider is that a lot of water will condense on the bottom of it and thus be wasted --same with making the walls taller, water would gather on the outside wall and just be cycled back into the unclean water.

What this thing needs is a spout. And a second bottle. Or, reasonably, just another container to hold the purified water, but there's no shortage of plastic bottles, so.

With a small spout, maybe 2" to 3" long and a 1/4" - 1/2" wide, at a minor angle from the ring, the water can still be collected in the ring, but now funnel to another container. This reduces the risk of spilling the clean water, and also increases the amount of dirty water that the bottle can hold as the ring will have to be placed a bit higher up in the container (midway or so). Of course, the collection time for the clean water will increase just from the larger amount that can be purified at once, but it saves a lot of mucking about with having to empty the purification ring every time it fills to capacity.

A notch would have to be cut into the bottle to allow for the spout, but I don't believe this would greatly impede the condensation process. If a second two-liter is used for clean water collection, a notch would also have to be cut into that one, but really any secondary container would work.

In case I haven't explained this properly, please enjoy this incredibly crude and not to scale at all mock-up drawing.

LH Water Purification Ring.jpg

I'm not sure of the specifics for printing this, as I currently and sadly do not have my own 3D printer. In fact I saw Les Hall's video posted on Twitter with a link to this forum and made an account just to post my idea. I'm not sure if others have thought of the same, or perhaps even better ideas, but I think it's a worthwhile thing and I wanted to at least contribute in some small way.

--Cheers then,
Mai

[LesterCHall]

Thank you for your ideas Mai! It turns out that the spout idea has occurred to several people, so I reason it must be a good idea. I'm going to continue initial testing with a variation of the original version, however soon I will add a spout and do it in such a way that it is 3D printable. While there will always be my own creative input into my projects, it seems best to put together all the suggestions for spout designs and figure out something that works well. Then there will be field testing with ideas from those in the field.

I figure my role in this now is to carry on with it, incorporating suggestions and printing up a bunch of them for others to test / make use of in the field.

Les

[Mjolinor]

Better still (<< unintentional pun) is to add the hole or tube for the liquid to run out but put a louvred cone on the top of the ring so that the whole cross section of the bottle becomes the catch area but being louvred to does not impeded the air circulation.

There are a hundred ways to do it but I think I prefer to stick the bottom of a smaller bottle in the centre of the bigger bottle with the dirty water in and just take a tap from the bottom of the bigger bottle. You need to paint the smaller bottle black and print the cone with white to maximise the function.

[LesterCHall]

Mjolinor, that's the first mention I've read bout using a separate container for the dirty water, such great ideas are flowing (intentional pun). My friend Aragon proposed the save louvered cone that you describe, which I feel is a great alternative. Ahhh how about we discard the bottom half of the 2 liter bottle and use a glass jar there. the glass jar can hold the dirty water and be painted black for heat reasons. hmmm or the bottle could be upside down with the top cut off of it. In both arrangements the thing that is printed, which must be small to be cost appropriate, is just a planar disc with details. keep the ideas um flowing!

Les

[LesterCHall]

Augh! As much as i love 3d printing it is difficult to realize that this task can be done (perhaps best) with NO 3D printed parts at all. Let's take three containers. the small one is painted flat black and sits inside of the large one, both of which are oriented in the normal "jar opening up" position. Then the medium sized container fits over the small one and inside of the large one. This is sort of like a U within an inverted U within a bigger U. Thoughts?

[LesterCHall]

Here, I made a screenshot video which illustrates what i was attempting to describe in the previous post:

[AxisLab]

Hey Les, I just started posting on this forum myself. Glad to see a familiar face, and to see your project getting such great attention.

[LesterCHall]

Yeah it's a new forum for me too, been hoping to find a good forum for my interests. And if you come up with a good one like your robo-hand-claw (love that one), they might even write up an article about it. I've got a 3D printed stepper motor that worked for a short time, need to reprogram a chip to make it work again and hope Brian and Eddie might like it well enough to write it up when working. They need chat tho like the ROBO3D shout box.

Les

[emaeye]

Thank you for your ideas Mai! It turns out that the spout idea has occurred to several people, so I reason it must be a good idea. I'm going to continue initial testing with a variation of the original version, however soon I will add a spout and do it in such a way that it is 3D printable. While there will always be my own creative input into my projects, it seems best to put together all the suggestions for spout designs and figure out something that works well. Then there will be field testing with ideas from those in the field.

I figure my role in this now is to carry on with it, incorporating suggestions and printing up a bunch of them for others to test / make use of in the field.

Les

Ah, it does stand to reason that many people would think of a spout. I'm glad that you're continuing at the forefront though, you clearly have a passion for the cause and that's always necessary to get things done.

As your next video illustrates, I think that there are probably several ways to distill water that are already known and for whatever reason not widely enough implemented in areas with undrinkable water, otherwise we wouldn't have this issue to begin with. At some point it does become less of what you can make, and more of how to get it into the right hands. It may be important, at some point when the model is finished, to contact humanitarian groups to see how the purifying ring can actually be delivered. Or, how to make sure that water stills get set up where they need to be.

I think that in a lot of areas, though, especially slums that have unclean running water, the portability and ease of your original idea would be the most useful and easiest to carry out in areas like this where there is not a lot of space for large water stills. When we think about areas without clean water, often the image evoked is that of a dry desert without any sort of plumbing and plenty of space to set up stills, but there are many urban areas around the world that also do not get clean water and do not have the benefit of space. I think the 3D ring would be incredibly useful to people in slums, that get running water but do not have the money to boil it before consumption.