Bleach Water Purification

Clean drinking water may be Africa’s single most serious humanitarian issue, and there are a multitude of technological attempts to inexpensively and simply remedy this problem; unfortunately none have seen widespread success. Bleach has been overlooked as a potential solution because chemical additives are frowned upon, with filtration methods seeing popular favor. Such a bias unfortunately ignores the realities that most affect lives of African villagers. Consider the current most popular attempt at providing clean water to millions now without it; the lifestraw. This device costs $20 to buy commercially and allegedly $5 to manufacture, and each filter can only purify 1,000 liters of water. On the other hand, one gallon of bleach can be purchased at a store for one dollar, and can purify over 14 times as much water (14,536 liters) as a lifestraw can, so long as large particulant contaminants have been pre-filtered out, which any villager is capable of doing simply with on-hand cotton clothing articles. All that remains is the essential step of getting the proportion of the mixture correct, as too great an amount of bleach could easily be lethal, and too small a proportion will give a false sense of security by failing to kill the pathogens. Our innovation removes human error from this process by its design to screw onto the threads of a typical mass-manufactured bleach bottle, and have a siphon tube placed into a vat of water to be purified. Inexpensive flow control valves permit only the precisely needed proportion of bleach to enter the water, which then automatically drops into a small holding tank which, when the necessary 30 minute purification time has passed, automatically drops into the “safe water” tank (due to the pre-determined weight of water that accumulates on top of a simple hinged flap). The only portion of our device that would require off-site manufacturing would cost several dollars and weigh only a few pounds.

Wind – Sail Power Generation

Our wind-sail power generation is designed to require only very few manufactured components, and instead relies primarily on what is readily available in most modern, impoverished areas. This innovation focuses on capturing usable energy from the wind using simpler means than the prevailing wind turbine approach; the time-tested sail approach that has been used to power ships for thousands of years. Instead of merely generating electricity, the pumping action produced by this device could be used to draw water from a nearby water source.

Easy Steam Engine

Although steam turbines are the source of the vast majority of the electrical power you receive when plugging into a typical outlet, there is a virtual complete absence of these on a small scale. Many admirable attempts to provide consumers with small-scale steam generators exist today, but unfortunately none are realistically useful for average consumers, much less for people of developing nations. The SJMS Easy Steam Engine takes a different approach by abandoning the assumption that a useful product must have a thermal efficiency that rivals other types of generators. We chose to abandon this assumption because of the simple fact that thermal efficiency is a meaningless piece of data if the energy source is one that would be wasted anyway; as is the case with a continually burning fire in a kitchen fireplace, outdoor campfire, or the like. Our simple pressure-cooker based design will provide ample energy to run electronics and lighting while costing very little to purchase.