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New Technology Uses Plasma to Purify Water

John Foster, an associate professor of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at the University of Michigan, is working on a method to purify water with the fourth state of matter - plasma. Foster hopes his new technology, which produces reactive radicals that can attack organic contaminants such as pesticides and pharmaceuticals, will help solve a problem not currently being addressed in conventional treatment methods that rely on filtration and chlorine. Originally envisioned as a point-of-use system for underdeveloped countries, this new technology could be scaled up to a larger mechanism that would be implemented as a stage in the conventional treatment process.

Topics:
Green Design & Manufacturing Remediation Technologies

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 right now as the population of the world explodes all societies are beginning to become more and more developed and so that means more agriculture more industry and more contamination and so these contaminants are getting into the water supplies and eventually they're going to reach levels where we we're going to reach that Tipping Point where where something new has to be done new

    00:00:20 technologies have to be introduced So currently we're looking at the use of plasma injection into liquid water for the purpose of uh water purification our whole water treatment infrastructure is based on the way the world was say 100 years ago conventional water treatment system literally it consists of a series of filters and then um a disinfection stage disinfection stage

    00:00:44 includes ozone as well as injection of chlorine that's it there's no additional chemistry that goes into your conventional plant to remove organic contaminants like pesticides Pharmaceuticals those small molecules just pass straight through the nice thing about plasmas is that you have this fourth state of matter matter it's glowing gas you inject it into the water

    00:01:05 it produces ozone UV light and all these reactive radicals and in this way the uh plasma can initiate the uh purification of the Water by simply attacking whatever organic contaminants that are in the order that includes things like pesticides Pharmaceuticals um and bacteria and Viro particles as well the stumbling block Still Remains throughput though in other

    00:01:29 words these these devices tend to be small and so processed volumes are also small and so we're looking at um alternative ways to make Plasma in much larger volumes when we first started this uh research we had envisioned it for a uh point of use treatment system particularly for underdeveloped countries so you can Envision this being at the center of a village where where

    00:01:54 people bring that water to it to be processed and that would be all solar powered as far as as developed countries particularly conventional water treatment systems here in the United States you can imagine having a stage where you have plasma producing electrodes injected in line to produce plasma to that flowing water so it would be in line it would be an additional

    00:02:15 stage that takes care of the contaminants that we aren't addressing right now the need for Technologies to remove uh these contaminants like PCB and pharmaceuticals even from our water supplies is important something needs to be done and um uh our our future essentially depends on it