A Solar Disinfection Water Treatment System for Remote Communities. Procedia Engineering, 2014.
Peter Kalt, et al.
Worldwide, approximately 780 million people do not have access to safe and clean water for drinking, cooking or washing.
Consumption of untreated water exposes humans to a range of contaminants including faecal-borne pathogens and chemical pollutants. As a consequence, it is estimated that 1.5 million people die each year as a result of the consumption of untreated or contaminated water. These deaths are preventable with access to clean and safe water, but capital costs and maintenance requirements for large-scale treatment systems are prohibitive and challenging to implement in remote or distributed communities. Such remote communities typically suffer from faecal contamination of transient water sources, rather than chemical or radiological contaminants. To address this problem a low-cost continuous-feed water treatment facility has been designed and developed. The facility utilises solar (UVA) radiation to treat pathogens. Additionally, the facility is designed such that it can be manufactured in-situ from limited or improvised resources at low capital and maintenance costs. The system is modular so that multiple systems can be used to increase water treatment capacity as required. Testing indicates that 3 modules of the design can treat 34L of water in 4 hours producing a 4-log reduction in E. Coli (from 8 × 105 CFU/ml) with a residence time of less than 30 minutes. This is based on an average solar-based UVA flux of ranging from 24 to 36 W/m2 (time average of 28 W/m2).
