IIT-M researchers part of winning team in US competition on using wave energy to desalinate water

Researchers from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are part of an international team that won the first two phases of the ‘Waves to Water Prize’ in a competition organised by the US Department of Energy. The objective of the team that won the first two phases is to design a wave energy-based desalination system to provide post-disaster drinking water supply to coastal areas.

Team ‘Nalu e Wai’, a collaboration between the US, India and Sweden, is working on a rapidly-deployable, small-scale wave-powered desalination system. They feel deployment of substantial numbers of such devices in water-scarce regions could produce life-changing results for water-starved coastal communities.

While the members of the team from India belong to the IIT-M, researchers from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, and Uppsala University, Sweden are other members.

Prof. Abdus Samad, Department of Ocean Engineering, IIT Madras, said the team’s primary driver for the aforementioned submission was the water shortage in India and to supplement the country’s knowledge in the area of wave energy conversion.

“We felt strongly that we could devise a system that would achieve the prize-motivated benefits of applicability to disaster-stricken areas and remote communities, while also being scalable to larger community applications such as Chennai, or in developed countries with water shortages, such as coastal California,” he said.

The idea is new for portable small-scale wave-powered desalination devices, Prof. Samad said, adding that the concept that they have designed is entirely scalable and its modularity allows it to be adapted to varying deployment sites and wave regimes. “The same concept could easily be scaled to support much larger water production with increasing flap size and by deploying devices in numbers,” the professor added.

The Waves to Water Prize is a five-stage, $3.3 million contest to accelerate the development of small, modular, wave-powered desalination systems capable of providing potable drinking water in disaster relief scenarios and remote coastal locations.

This prize is part of the US Department of Energy’s ‘Water Security Grand Challenge,’ focused on advancing transformational technology and innovation to meet the global need for secure and affordable water, the IIT-M said in a statement.

Prof. Abhijit Chaudhuri, Department of Applied Mechanics, IIT Madras, said desalination has become imperative in order to solve the problem of global freshwater scarcity, particularly for the coastal areas.

“As one of the most concentrated forms of renewable energy, wave energy offers an environmentally friendly alternative and is highly favourable for seawater desalination in coastal areas with good wave resources,” he added.