Ultrasound Water

Purification

Group Number: 24
Professor Bigelow
Jacob Bernhard/Team leader
Yuhao Fu/Team Communication Leader
Parker Oltrogge/Team Webmaster
Subin Mao/Team Key Concept Holder
Xiyuan Wang/Team member
Tao Wu/ Team member
may1724@iastate.edu
Team Website
may1724.sd.ece.iastate.edu

Revised: 12/5/16/Version 2
Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Project statement
1.2 Purpose
1.3 Goals
2 Deliverables
3 Design
3.1 System specifications
3.1.1 Non-functional
3.1.2 Functional
3.2 Proposed Design/Method
3.3 DESIGN ANALYSIS
4 Testing/Development
4.1 Interface Specifications
4.2 Hardware/software
4.2 Process
5 Results
6 Conclusions
7 References
8 Appendices

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1 Introduction
1.1 PROJECT STATEMENT
Our goal is to create an ultrasound based filtration system. It is broken down into three separate

parts that we are attempting to create. The first part of the project is to use an ultrasound to eliminate

organisms in the water. The next section is to create a filtration system that filters the water of matter.

Lastly, we will be creating our own testing system that tests the quality of the water.

1.2 PURPOSE
The past several decades have witnessed a severe lack of clean potable water in South African

area. This is a problem that our team is attempting to alleviate. Our driving purpose is to create an

alternative method to purify water using ultrasound. This will hopefully eliminate the need to replace

filters, and lower the overall cost of filtration in the region.

1.3 GOALS
The goal of this project is to develop and test a water filtration/sterilization system based on

ultrasound. This project is more of a proof of concept rather than a finished design. We want to see if we

are able to create a device that meets the requirements, and is able to be scaled down to be affordable. If

we are able to prove the design of our filtration system works, then we will ultimately attempt to create a

deployable device.

2 Deliverables
In order to achieve our goals, we have to have things that need to be accomplished. First we will

need to create our product. This product is broken down into three parts: ultrasonic filtration, matter

filtration, and a flowing water sensor. When discussing with the client, we decided to break the

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deliverables up into these three different sections. We will record our findings, and design details into

three mini reports that can be used individually, or combined into one cohesive description of the

product.

3 Design
3.1 SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS

3.1.1 Non-functional
The main non-functional requirement for this project is to pass the potability test in the testing center

that we send our samples. This will be make or break for our projects concept. If the initial testing doesnt

pan out we may need to rethink our hypothesis.

3.1.2 Functional
Our ultrasound water purification system needs to kill harmful bacteria in the water and then

filter out undesired matter. Afterwards we need to test the water using our own testing system to see if it

matches the correct values that the testing center came up with. Not only meeting the requirement of

drinking water (as far as we found there is no worldwide accepted requirement for pure drinking water.

America has EPA, most of Europe has its own. Great Britain uses its own system and most third world

countries have no government entity for pure safe drinking water) we also need to develop an enclosed

housing container for the clean drinkable water. This will help eliminate the water from being

contaminated after it has been purified.

3.2 PROPOSED DESIGN/METHOD

The main method of purification that we are attempting to accomplish, is applying an ultrasound

wave to water, so that the focal point hits the surface or just below the surface. This way the water

splatters and we will be able to catch this water to run it through our matter filtration system which may

have two different sections.

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 The matter filtration has two different methods that we could employ. The first method is using a

standing wave in order to trap solid particles in different collision points of the waves. The second method

is to use a non-carbon based standard filter. Both of these methods will accomplish our goal, though we

would like to employ the ultrasonic solution, because it lowers the necessity to replace filters.

The last section is the flowing water sensor. This sensor will need to take samples of the water to

determine the different safety conditions of the water. These conditions will probably be based on the

WHO system of water purification, and a mixture of Ames water purification plant in order to reach a set

standard for our own filtered water.

3.3 DESIGN ANALYSIS

After several iterations we found our most recent version of the design to be the most functional

(see appendix). The initial complications that arose when trying to design a proper mechanism was the

necessity to have an isolated system. We have two bodies of water that cannot interact but at the same

time the sound waves need to be able to flow between the two. This is done through a membrane in the

test tube. The initial design was to have a catching system where the transducer was floating at the

appropriate level.

The initial concerns that were given about this design was the cross contamination between the pure and
dirty water. The second iteration was born from this train of thought. We birthed the concept of having
an isolated tube that would have an inflow and outflow section(appendix). The initial thought process
would have the transducer locked and sealed in the lower container. This was dismissed for our testing
design because we needed to have access to the valves to control the inflow and outflow of water. This is
why we created the cross that holds the tube up.

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4 Testing/Development
4.1 INTERFACE SPECIFICATIONS
In order to test the quality of water, we find a standard of quality for drinking water. This standard

is from World Health Organization(WHO). We will use sensors to test four aspects of the purified water

which are PH, chlorine, iron, and fluoride. The parameters for these four aspects are 6.5 to 8 for PH,

0.25g/L for chlorine, 0.3mg/L for iron, and 1.5mg/L for fluoride. These four parameters will be our

standard to determine whether the purified water is safe for drinking.

4.2 HARDWARE/SOFTWARE
There are three sensors needed for testing the purified water. They are PH sensor, heavy metal

sensor, and thermometer. We will try to design our own circuit for PH sensor and thermometer. But, for

heavy metal, we will buy a sensor online and use this sensor to test the three heavy metal which we want

to detect.

Circuit Diagram for thermometer:

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The core part of this circuit is the diode 1N4148 (D1 in the circuit) as the temperature sensor. Using the

Shockley diode equation ( I = I S ( 1), we can find the relationship between the output

voltage and temperature. In order to display the measured temperature, we would use arduino to show

the temperature by programming.

For the ph sensor, we found a doable circuit diagram from SPARKYSWIDGETS.com, which is

based on arduino ph probe interface. The things we need to build are some resists, two op-amps, two

capacitors, and a ph probe. If we have an ideal probe numbers we should see an output of 0.414V when

ph equals to 0 and -0.414 V when ph equals to 14. Therefore, we can use measured voltage to convert to

ph value via arduino programming.

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 (Figure: Basic design for ph sensor)

4.3 PROCESS
In order to test the quality of the water after purified, we would use some different kinds of

sensors to detect it. Since the core part of the project is using ultrasound to kill the certain bacteria, we

would detect the water sample using a culture to see if the bacteria had been killed by ultrasound. If the

quantity of the bacteria decreases tremendously, the purification is built successfully. Otherwise, the

purification is not good enough. Then we have to detect the other qualities of the purified water. Once

water flow out of the purification system, we would measure the heavy metal concentration of the water

like chlorine, iron, and fluoride using heavy metal sensors. And then, water would flow into a large tank,

we can only measure still waters ph value since electrode in ph probe have to measure the hydrogen ions

concentration to get the ph value under a still environment. Because temperature has a variety of effects

on electrodes, we have to monitor the temperature as well. That is the reason why we build a

thermometer for testing part, although temperature would not affect water quality too much.

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5 Results
Our ultrasound water purification system needs to kill harmful bacteria in the water and then

filter out undesired matter. Afterwards we need to test the water using our own testing system to see if it

matches the correct values that the testing center came up with. Not only meeting the requirement of

drinking water (as far as we found there is no worldwide accepted requirement for pure drinking water.

America has EPA, most of Europe has its own. Great Britain uses its own system and most third world

countries have no government entity for pure safe drinking water) we also need to develop an enclosed

housing container for the clean drinkable water. This will help eliminate the water from being

contaminated after it has been purified.

One of the main challenges that our team faces, is that we have limited resources that we can

utilize. One of the main components that we will most likely need is a Network Analyzer. This NA will

allow us to integrate multiple transducers into our circuit. The cost of this piece of equipment is

enormous, and the school doesnt have one available for us to freely use. Also our limited working

knowledge of water purification may hinder our speed of completion as we are learning the material that

we are also working to complete.

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6 Conclusions
We plan to design, build, and test the usability of ultrasound in water purification. Our project

design requires the use of two separate ultrasonic transducers, one which is intended to kill bacteria and

the other to trap dangerous particulates. First and simplest in the killing of bacteria by ripping the cells

apart and spraying water. Secondly we will be testing the theoretical possibility of trapping heavy

particulates into a standing ultrasonic wave. Our project will be tested for ability to create safe water, and

compared to standard water purification methods by volume of clean water per unit energy consumed.

The most important goal as of now is the killing of harmful bacteria using ultrasound. The second goal is

the trapping of heavy particulates using ultrasound. The third goal is to test our purified water to see

the levels of bacteria and heavy metals, the end ph and temperature.

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7 References
"National Primary Drinking Water Regulations." EPA. Environmental Protection Agency, n.d. Web. 28 Oct.
2016.

Bigelow, Timothy A., Jin Xu, Dan J. Stessman, Linxing Yao, Martin H. Spalding, and Tong Wang. "Lysis of
Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii by High-intensity Focused Ultrasound as a Function of Exposure Time."
Ultrasonics Sonochemistry 21.3 (2014): 1258-264. Web.

"Arduino Ph Probe Interface - Sparky's Widgets." Sparkys Widgets. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Nov. 2016.

Wilson, Chris P. "Water Quality Notes: Water Clarity (Turbidity, Suspended Solids, and Color)." SL314
(2013): n. pag. Web.

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8 Appendices

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