Summary

&nbsp For my Senior Capstone project at Northeastern University, I was part of a 5-man team that decided to design a low cost, portable water filter that could sustain a family of four. Millions of people live near running water in streams or rivers, and yet have no way to purify that water easily. This contributes heavily to the 485,000 deaths annually from waterborne diseases. To ease complexity in our system, we wanted it to be purely hydrokinetic. This means that it would be powered purely by the velocity of the current instead of pressure head, which currently wasn’t represented in the market. Traditionally, you would artificially create such pressure head through a damn or pipe running down a slope, but this takes extra material, effort, and space. For additional reduction of complexity and cost, as well as to maximize efficiency, we went with a purely mechanical system including the pump. No electronics whatsoever are present in the system. Below is our poster showing the background and results of this project.

Below are two videos. The first is a tapletop demonstration of the system, where the turbine is being spun by a electric motor in place of running water. You can observe water running out of the tube and into the container.

The second video is from our outdoor testing of the system, successfully pumping water against a 2.5m pressure head from 1.1 m/s stream.</span>