University of Texas Competing in Desal Water Challenge

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University of Texas Competing in Desal Water Challenge

The Desal prize is a combined effort of the U.S. Agency for International Development and agencies from the Netherlands and Sweden

Now, delegates from the team, including UNT professor Miguel Acevedo, will get to run a series of tests with the water purification device as finalists for the Desal Prize.

The team is one of five finalists competing for the prize, which is a combined effort of the U.S. Agency for International Development and agencies from the Netherlands and Sweden.

"One of the major issues to solve food security is having enough water to irrigate the crops," Acevedo said. "This provides the technology to make the water [usable], which would then enable the elimination of hunger and poverty."

The device is about the size of four refrigerators put together, Acevedo estimated. It takes underground water that has some salt in it, called brackish water, and makes it suitable for irrigating crops and drinking, using only renewable energy.

The machine and four others will be tested Thursday through Saturday in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The teams will demonstrate how to use the devices, and must produce quotas of drinking water and irrigation water to prove the technology.

To get to this level, the five had to beat out 62 other teams with members from 29 countries.

On the team with UNT students and faculty, called GreenDesal, are professors from the National Center for Agricultural Research and Extension in Jordan, the Asian Institute of Technology and Management in Nepal, the State University of Ponta Grossa in Brazil and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

The team has been working on the project for almost a year, Acevedo said.

"We are drawing expertise from a variety of institutions and individuals," he said. "It's important to us because we want to contribute to solving problems of food security around the world."

The technologies demonstrated could be able to help rural farmers.

Source: DentonRC

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