Development of a Water Purification Device

The world is faced with a decrease in freshwater supply and current water infrastructure is under strain to supply drinkable water. Some of the most recent designs for portable purification devices are not able to purify all the different classes of impurities. This paper presents the development of a water purification device. To achieve this, the proposed solution will purify water from a wider range of impurities including pathogens, heavy metal and volatile organic compounds. The proposed design is portable, modular, ecology-friendly and a low-cost power-consuming design. Stainless steel is the selected material for the design due to its high food grade approval. Purification is based on boiling and heat exchanger systems. It incorporates an inlet filter, activated carbon filter and outlet bio-sand filter to purify contaminated water. The research found the design to be theoretically able to remove the 4 types of impurities it was designed to. Computational Fluid Dynamics was used to conduct investigations on the effectiveness of the heat exchanger and was found to be effective.