The struggle of water is as real as it can get. This issue we have been talking about and have been teaching/preaching for decades. Most of the natural sources of fresh water are close to deplete or almost depleted. We have consumed 60% of total ground water in the last 10 years - which means that we need to dig deeper in most places and adding to horror, few places don't even have any ground water left due to varied layer of earth and crust composition.
Solution for this aims to search for alternatives to the decreasing availability of fresh water and continuous rising demands.
One way of accessing fresh water is to tap the vast coast line of India to exploit sea water for our water needs. India has a very long coast line measuring 7800KM. The process to convert sea water to fresh water is called desalination.
Sea water is desalinated to produce fresh water suitable for human consumption or irrigation. One by-product of desalination is salt. Desalination is already used on many seagoing ships and submarines. Most of the modern interest in desalination is focused on cost-effective provision of fresh water for human use. Along with recycled wastewater, it is one of the few rainfall-independent water sources.
Solution for this aims to search for alternatives to the decreasing availability of fresh water and continuous rising demands.
One way of accessing fresh water is to tap the vast coast line of India to exploit sea water for our water needs. India has a very long coast line measuring 7800KM. The process to convert sea water to fresh water is called desalination.
Sea water is desalinated to produce fresh water suitable for human consumption or irrigation. One by-product of desalination is salt. Desalination is already used on many seagoing ships and submarines. Most of the modern interest in desalination is focused on cost-effective provision of fresh water for human use. Along with recycled wastewater, it is one of the few rainfall-independent water sources.
Storyboard
Looks Like Prototype
Desalination plant needs to be created on sea bed. This plant is fed with salt water from the ocean/sea, which then uses different desalination method to convert salt water to fresh water.
Few of these techniques are - Reverse osmosis and membrane distillation.
What will you do:
Setup desalination plant near coastlines close to cities which have major water demand.
What hypothesis will it test?
Hypothesis - Desalination process will generate enough water to cater to major portion of city demand.
Cost of Experiment -
The look alike model took 50Rs to make.
Desalination plant cannot be made for a small scale. A decent sized desalination plant cost about 5B INR to establish, and produces 00000000 litres a day
How will you measure the success -
The success of the solution will be measured by these parameters:
- Does all families have access to potable drinking water.
- Has the demand for water trucks decreased?
- Has the load on ground water decreased.?
Dear sumit,
ReplyDeleteDrinking Water is a previous resource which is on the brink of becoming a scare resource despite it's abundance in nature. Our nation has been declared as a water stressed country. Further, cities like Chennai and Aurangabad are suffering from acute water shortage. I appreciated your thoughts and efforts towards solving this very challenging socio-economic problem. Here are some of my inputs:
1) Develop a low cost desalination model with technology firms
2) Focus on alternative technology such as ion-exchange or reverse osmosis
3) Explore economies of scope got these plants
All the best!!
Regards
Vishwajith
Hey Sumit,
ReplyDeleteWonderful read. Loved the way you put it.
In addition to tackling the supply problem by looking at alternative sources, I think its also extremely important that we improve the current operating efficiencies. The Chennai Desalination plant, If i remember correctly, runs grossly under-efficient. Also, in General 40 - 50% of the pumped water gets lost on the way, because of pipe leaks, misuse etc. These are some key challenges that need to be addressed.
Also, to reduce the load on the plant and to make the consumers less reliant by encouraging conservatism, I completely second the suggestion by Viswajit. I think it's high-time we have RO plants in every apartments and at common points in various civic bodies. This will improve the current efficiencies by leaps.
All the very best,
Ganesh