H-purifier unit a decentralized drinking water supply system for developing countries
1 1.2 billions People in the developing world do not have access to safe drinking water; these numbers are even outpacing the population’s numbers in Europe. The situation resulting negative impacts on developing countries such as the increase in waterborne diseases, high prices of clean water, and children and woman endure heavy burden to collect water in far distances. H-Purifier is the new concept of decentralized drinking water supply that was created for solving the problems above. The system is developed by using an Ultra Filtration (UF) membrane as the main treatment units. Since UF membrane, have big advantages such as applicable in small or large applications, produce high quantity of water, and have the ability to separate all suspended contaminants from water. Beside of using high quality technology such as UF membrane, H-Purifier is designed to use it in a simple way. It is achieved by using technologies such as a Bike water pump, sand filtration and hand piston pump to equip the membrane technology. The three technologies were chosen to support H-Purifier on achieving the design criteria. Designs criteria were created based on local conditions on people in developing countries and experience of decentralize drinking water supply that was already been applied developing countries. The design criteria will be focusing on H-Purifier performances: such as low amount of energy, compact design installation, easy to operate and maintain, and producing water on high quality and quantity. According on the experiments using the H-Purifier prototype, the H-Purifier prototype was able to produce water with flow rate of 150 l/h and decontaminated particle with sizes at minimum of one micron meter and maximum of 0.0035 micron meter. This amount of flow rate means H-Purifier has the maximum flow rates of 3.6 m3/day that will ensure the needs of drinking water for 180 people who lack an of access drinking water in developing countries. In addition, the water is safe to drink and not harmful for human body because of contaminants such as colloids, viruses and bacteria are rejected from the water by using membrane UF. The consumption of energy in H-Purifier is also low with only 1.2 Watt of energy consumption for operating the system. To reach this amount of energy the H-Purifier uses a bike water pump that needs at least 54 Joule of rotational kinetic energy of bike wheel and spends human energy as much 5.8 kJ/h. H-Purifier is easy to operate because it use bike water pump as main station pump. Since it is clearly recognize, people from the entire world is commonly to operate a bicycle. Therefore, people in developing will not find difficulties to operate H-Purifier. Furthermore, H-Purifier also has the simple technique for the maintenance with using hand piston pump as backwash pump for cleaning Ultrafiltration membranes. People will able to maintain the membrane system with using their own hand. H-Purifier is already in the right track for heading it function as decentralized water supply system in developing countries. However, it still needs time before the real installation is ready to establish in the developing countries. The time is needed for the improvement and development that should be made on H-Purifier. H-Purifier still needs improvements since the prototype could not meet one of the criterion design as compact design installation and the bike water pump has not perform at it highest capability yet. If these two aspects can be improved then without a doubt H-Purifier will able to help people in developing countries who lack an access of safe drinking water and also will help the MDG to reach it goals by reducing halve proportion of people in the world without safe drinking water. In addition, H-Purifier will guarantee that safe drinking water is a right and not a privilege matter anymore.