Solar water purifier brings health, hope to orphanage

Northwest faculty members design low-tech pasteurizer to meet needs in developing world

haiti med

Mirlande Alcene, director of the House of
Hope Haiti orphanage and school, pours
drinking water from a plastic jug. The water
was purified and filtered using a solar device,
shown in the background of the photo,
designed and built by two Northwest
Department of Chemistry and Physics faculty
members, Dr. Mike Bellamy and Dr. David
Richardson.

About three years ago Dr. Mike Bellamy, associate professor chemistry at Northwest, began spending his winter breaks in the impoverished Caribbean country of Haiti, where his mother’s church, Prince of Peace Lutheran in Topeka, Kan., was establishing an orphanage and school some 40 miles from the capital, Port-au-Prince.

It was a worthy cause, and the work and mission of what has come to be called House of Hope Haiti soon captured his heart, as did the children who live there.

“The kids we took in … they would be dead if the school had not gotten them off the streets,” he said. “We were it.”

But, as many a humanitarian has discovered, Bellamy soon realized that House of Hope Haiti needed to look beyond basic efforts to provide relief from hunger, homelessness and ignorance if it was to make a permanent dent in Haiti’s relentless struggle against poverty and disease.

One of the key problems, he found, was the lack of safe drinking water. And that’s what led Bellamy the mission worker to begin thinking like Bellamy the trained scientist, analyzing the data and working toward a solution.

“Anytime I’ve gone anywhere in Haiti, water is the key issue,” he said. “People are just screaming for water.”

One thing led to another, and this year over spring break Bellamy, along with four students from the Missouri Academy of Science, Mathematics and Computing, returned to House of Hope Haiti with a prototype of a solar-powered water pasteurizer that he built in his basement with help from a colleague, Dr. David Richardson, assistant professor of physics.

Bellamy and the Missouri Academy students installed the rugged, low-tech device at House of Hope in order to field test it. Initial results have been encouraging.

“We studied just about every water treatment technology there is for developing countries, and we discovered that there is no magic bullet,” Bellamy said. “It’s very common to find stories about people trying to do these sorts of projects -- people who have the very best intentions -- and then failing.”

The challenge, said Bellamy, is finding a technology that is a good fit for the culture and environment in which it will be used. Otherwise, “It just gets chopped up for firewood.”

After experimenting with a number of systems, such as a commercially available machine filled with delicate glass tubes, Bellamy and Richardson decided to start, more or less, from scratch.

The device they had in mind had to be relatively cheap and simple enough so that intended users could understand it, build it and repair it using readily available parts and simple plans posted on the Internet.

At the heart of the system they eventually came up with is a commercially-available flat plate absorber -- a simple grid fashioned out of copper pipe -- that sits in a glass-covered insulated box made of wood or cement. Bellamy found that buying the absorbers ready-made is cheaper than making them from stock pipe.

Sunlight goes through the glass and hits the water-filled flat plate absorber, which quickly heats the water to around 180 degrees Fahrenheit. When the water has been hot enough for long enough, a wax valve similar to an automobile thermostat opens, allowing the water to flow into a homemade heat-exchanger. This is simply a large pipe filled with cool water that draws heat from a smaller pipe containing hot water. From there, the pasteurized water flows into a storage tank and ultimately through a carbon filter similar to those many homeowners add to their kitchen faucets.

No electricity is required, and turning the system on is a matter of opening the lid and making sure there is water in a second storage tank used to feed the flat plate absorber.

Bellamy said every time he visits Haiti he meets people associated with other schools and orphanages where safe water is in short supply. As a result, he is writing a training manual that describes different ways of disinfecting water in developing countries.

Eventually he hopes to incorporate water disinfection into the curriculum of House of Hope Haiti and create a water training center, whose graduates can implement different types of disinfection technologies throughout their homeland.

In a country beset by unemployment and extremely low wages, Bellamy thinks schools like House of Hope Haiti may eventually be able to sell excess drinking water to help pay teachers and provide better care for the children they are trying to rescue from lives of hopeless poverty.

Funds for building the prototype water pasteurizer were provided through a Northwest Applied Research Grant, but many associated expenses have been paid out of Bellamy’s own pocket. Though he has spent a significant amount of money, he says he still hasn’t given as much as he would like to.

“I just feel like God has called me to do something,” he said. “There is a lot of joy in this. You don’t miss out by giving time and money away. In fact, you’re gaining."

Anyone interested in learning more about the House of Hope Haiti water purification project should e-mail bellamy@nwmissouri.edu.

For more information, please contact:

Anthony Brown,
News Bureau Manager
E-Mail: abrown@nwmissouri.edu
Phone: 660.562.1704
Fax: 660.562.1900

Northwest Missouri State University
219 Administration Building,
800 University Drive
Maryville, MO 64468

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