- Water.org
WATTER PURIFICATION, CREO + CMU
DATE: DEC - APR 2015
CATEGORY: SOCIAL INNOVATION
ROLE: FOUNDER / LEAD DESIGNER
Obtaining clean, drinkable water is difficult in many areas throughout the world, especially in developing & under-developed countries. 3.4 million people in the world die each year from “a water related disease” and 780 million people “lack access to clean water”, according to water.org.
With a goal to address this problem, I worked on 2 water purification projects through the course of my career; CreH20 and LUV Water.
CreH2O was a project that I executed while running my company Creo Designworks. The goal of the project was to design a water purification device for remote areas of India. We worked with a Chicago based company called Northern Biotechnologies to integrate their technology into an affordable and usable water purification device.
As a part of this project, we conducted extensive ethnographic research to understand the lifestyle and habits, conceptualized solutions and conducted rapid prototyping to attain maximum microbe destruction rate.
LUV Water was a second water purification project that I worked on in my graduate program. Started as a class project, we won a Boeing sponsored innovation challenge and were selected at an incubator in Pittsburgh.
LUV Water is a water purification device that uses UV LEDs to clean water. The UV LEDs are powered through the gravitational potential energy of the water, and does not require any additional sources of power. The potential energy of the water will be converted to electrical energy through a small generator. That electricity is used to power ultraviolet (UV) LEDs, which kill bacteria and germs in the water.
