Project Overview

The desalination crew chose this project based on its wide impact.  A transportable desalination system would grant access to drinking water in places that either have low-quality water or low supply, or somewhere that has suffered a disaster which contaminated the water.  

Our goal is to design and build a reverse osmosis (RO) desalination system.  Once we get the brackish system going, it’s possible to convert it to seawater if the funding is available.   A previous graduate student, Lin Lin, was working with an RO filtration system, but her focus was to ultrasonically test for defective membranes.  We will be working with her – and her University of Southern Maine students, who will be creating the data acquisition system – to convert the filtration system to our purposes.  

We face several challenges in this conversion: 
•    First, we need to make sure the system is mechanically sound
•    We must be able to test the salinity – as well as other factors like total dissolved solids – of the permeate, to see the effectiveness of the system
•    A new pump, which will supply the necessary pressure and flow rate for the system we will design
•    Pre- and post-treatment systems must be designed and built to make the end product fit to drink
•    We need some way to monitor membrane fouling
•    Parts such as throttling valves and pressure gages must be selected
•    The parts and plumbing must be assembled into a desalination system

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