Julie Frost’s ‘Mvura’ Water Purifier Wins Design Award
by Warren McLaren, Sydney 
on 06.27.06
The Mvura (African Shona for ‘water’) was one of the student exhibits at ChangeX, which we noted earlier this year. It has been granted Bronze Prize in the student category of the 2006 Australian Design Awards. Julie Frost identified that “1.2 billion people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water and 6, 000 children die every day from diseases that can be prevented by improved water and sanitation.” Her answer to this dilemma was to create a household water purifier that use pasteurization using direct solar heat to treat water. 15 litres of water is added to the drum, this can then be carried in traditional manner, on one’s head. Back at the village the drum opens out into a wide black disk, so water can be heated, in about two hours, to 65ºC. At this temperature harmful bacteria are said to be neutralised, and a soybean wax is used to indicated that the correct temp has been attained. Made from polyethylene, one of the more benign plastics, the drum is designed to be field maintainable. Cameron ’Design Like You Give Damn’ Sinclair and Victor ‘Design for the Real World’Papanek, would, I’m sure, be very proud of Julie’s endeavours. We need more like her. Other pics after the fold, and also at ::Australian Design Awards and ::University of NSW.
How the Mvura functions.
Other student works entered for the awards which have a green tinge to them include: a steam based dishwasher that only uses 6 litres of recycling water, a solar panel than combines both electricity and hot water heating, seat cover designed especially for car sharing, an in shower, user controlled, greywater diverter, and a mini solar-powered hydrogen production unit.
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any idea how much it costs?
My experience with polyethylene is that it breaks down in UV after about six months. There are UV stabilized polyethylenes available but I have no experience with them and their failure rates.
This is basically "natural" UV treatment used widely as a source of disinfection in Water Treatment Plants. Or like in Bermuda when they retain rain water on the roof of their house...
Travelling and need disinfected water? Fill jars or bottles (clear), close, and leave in the sun for a day or two. Might not taste the greatest, but gets the job done. The ecosystem chokes it self out, so to speak.
If you are trying to find similar technologies for water filtration, check out the Senior Design projects for Mech Eng at MIT. A few years back a friend of mine made a filter system that was from local materials (I think local, I cannot recall -- too bad she is working for Shell now). And others have been investigating Waste Water Treatment in many 3rd world countries, this is more of an issue in places with safe drinking water. Solving the waste issue somewhat inherently solves the water issue.
I'd echo the concern about degrading in sunlight, and about cost.
SODIS, or "solar water disinfection" (the Wikipedia article is a good start) is a much simpler approach, using PET bottles. Mind you, this looks convenient, but doesn't get the advantage of UV rays coming through clear plastic, and presumably is much more expensive.
I've written up a page of options for sourcing and treatment of water - and it's on a wiki (Appropedia), so contributions are welcome: Choosing water supply and purification methods
Does anyone know where I can get plans or ideas on how to construct my own UV water treater for my pond?
TIA