Team Name: The Batchelors

Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

Team deliverables

Why this competition?

More than two billion people lack access to safe, reliable, clean drinking water, and 40% live within 100 kilometers of a coast . Although vast and within reach of a large portion of the population, ocean water is undrinkable unless desalinated, which is an expensive, energy-intensive process. Harnessing wave energy to power desalination systems will increase resilience in coastal communities, particularly in those with less developed infrastructure relying on expensive imported fuel to power desalination plants. The Marine Energy Collegiate Competition allows our team to explore the market for a highly efficient, highly reliable, and low-cost desalination system powered by wave energy.

Our team members include Katie Brodersen, Emily Bywater, Brittany Cafferty, Kumansh Furia, Nathaniel Kiefer, Alec Lanter, Deepika Ramchandani Hayden Schennum, Maulee Sheth, and Abigail Werner. We are working with the Warsinger Water Lab at Purdue, advised by Dr. David Warsinger and lab students Akshay Rao, Sandra Córdoba, and Abhimanyu Das.

Project description, including application in the blue economy

A wave energy converter (WEC) will drive the pressurization of water for the batch reverse osmosis system, enabling an autonomous and highly efficient desalination solution for coastal communities. The system will be fully driven by marine energy and will be able to be deployed and maintained by local contractors.

Game plan

Through the second week of February, we will conduct market research, iterate our design, create a low-fidelity prototype, and increase our competency with WEC-Sim.

By the end of February—at the latest—we will submit our purchase orders for all parts, and by the first week in March, we will have a midfidelity prototype completed. During this time, we will also be working on modeling our system. Throughout March, we will complete a high-fidelity prototype so we can validate and test the design during the first week and a half of April.

We will begin to develop our business plan at the beginning of February with the assistance of a student from Purdue’s Krannert School of Management, and we have already begun working on an environmental analysis of our design, which will be under consistent review throughout the project.

Team strengths

Resources at the Warsinger Water Lab and Resolute Marine
The strong, highly-variable skill set of the mechanical engineers on our team, including aviation, computer-aided design, modeling/simulation, controls, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, design, automation, heat transfer, and environmental engineering
The size of our team
Diversity—most team members are majoring in mechanical engineering, but we do have team members with backgrounds in entrepreneurship, Spanish, electrical and computer engineering, environmental engineering, German, management, and aviation.

Team hurdles

Understanding the batch reverse osmosis system previously developed at the Warsinger Water Lab
Time constraints—challenges of juggling MECC deliverables with those of our senior design course
COVID restrictions—limited ability to meet in person and access facilities that would normally be more accommodating.

Competition objectives

Above all, we aim to create a functional product that is adaptable to different WEC archetypes so desalination can be easily implemented around the world.

We are excited to gain prototyping and testing experience and welcome the challenges presented by a constrained budget and tight deadline. We look forward to presenting our results and networking with industry representatives and academic scholars at the International Conference on Ocean Energy in April.

Social media accounts

LinkedIn: Purdue Marine Energy Collegiate Competition

Instagram: @purduemecc

Twitter: @PurdueMECC

This portal is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) under Contract Number DE- AC36-08GO28308 with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Contract Number DE-AC05-76RL01830 with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Contract Number DE-NA0003525 with Sandia National Laboratories, as part of the MHK Data Communities project. The United States Government retains, and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes.

MECC 2021 Purdue University