Plants Inspire Solutions To Water Woes

nanowell — The NanoWell prototype produced for the Global Water Technologies Competition.
(Courtesy of Coleman Fincher)

Students from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University collaborated with a student from the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering to develop a new way to fight clean water access issues facing the world today.

With over 700 million people currently suffering from inconsistent access to clean drinking water, Coleman Fincher and his team saw the need for consumers to be reached almost anywhere.

Previous research achieved a low-cost solution with technical simplicity; however, these solutions are not accessible by consumers everywhere. The team hopes its project, the NanoWell, will provide a solution to accessibility problems while remaining inexpensive.

“We believed that we could render a design that maintains simplicity and low-cost and meet the challenges for consistency while remaining user friendly,” explained Fincher, a junior mechanical engineering student and the team leader. “Our design draws inspiration from plants, which use capillary action to draw water through their roots.”

Similar to the functions of a plant, the idea was modeled after a leaf with high surface area. This allowed the team to design a condenser 10 times smaller than those produced by earlier researchers.

“The NanoWell, has a dew collection surface or collection leaf, woven from hollow microfibers,” Fincher said. “By stacking these collection leaves, we can obtain a large amount of dew collection with an area slightly smaller that a standard drum.”

Geoffrey Garner, a junior mechanical engineering student, and Jeffy Ho, a junior petroleum engineering student, have worked with Fincher for the last several months.

Geoffrey Garner, Coleman Fincher and Jeffy Ho with their 2nd place award at the Global Water Technologies Competition at Rice University.
(Courtesy of Coleman Fincher)

“Our overall goal is to provide safe drinking water to citizens, particularly those in remote and low-resource regions,” Fincher said. “We hope to act as a stepping stone toward solving water insecurity.”

The team worked with Dr. Tanil Ozkan, visiting assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, to develop a prototype of its project.

“This entire concept is the brainchild of Fincher,” Ozkan said. “Since my graduate research has also been on polymer nanocomposites, I immediately noticed the immense potential of the project pursued by the group.”

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