Purifying Hydrogel Tablet Makes River Water Potable In An Hour

Access to clean water is a luxury in many parts of the world. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new hydrogel tablet that could help, with a prototype able to disinfect a liter of river water in one hour, Michael Irving reported for New Atlas recently.

Photo Insert: The prototype hydrogel is said to be able to disinfect a liter of river water in an hour.

The most common way to disinfect water is usually to boil it, but that can take a lot of time and energy that may not be readily available in developing regions. Scientists are tackling the problem with devices like solar stills, graphene filters, and automatic chlorine dispensers, but often these can be inefficient or still require energy.

For the new study, the researchers developed a method that should be relatively easy and require no energy to run. It’s a hydrogel tablet that can simply be dropped into a container of water, where it kills more than 99.999 percent of bacteria within an hour or so. The hydrogel can then be removed, leaving no residue or chemicals behind.

The tablets work by generating hydrogen peroxide, which works with activated carbon particles to kill bacteria by disrupting their metabolism. The team says that no harmful byproducts are created in the process.

These hydrogel purifiers could also find use in improving other techniques, like solar distillation. These systems work by focusing the heat of the Sun to evaporate water and collect it in another container, leaving contaminants behind.

This equipment can get clogged up with microbes, but the team says that the new hydrogel could prevent that. The research was published in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.

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