Michael Levine, creator of the ubiquitous programmable VCR/television remote control, has tuned his attention from the living room to a much larger frontier.
The 68-year-old inventor and holder of some 76 patents is working with a team from Florida Atlantic University to commercialize his new low-cost, highly efficient desalination method to produce clean water.
"Power plants are only 30 percent efficient," he told Inventors Digest recently, and all generate heat as a byproduct. His concept recycles an energy plant's waste heat to distill saline or non-potable water at a near vacuum and at room temperature. The process is estimated to be 10 times more efficient than existing technologies.
Developing environmental technologies offers a ripe area of innovation, as the world comes to grips with a raft of micro and macro climactic challenges - from global warming to deforestation and lack of adequate drinking-water supplies in developing nations. Tapping the world's oceans, which hold 97 percent of Earth's water, could one day help satisfy the needs of a thirsty planet.
Helping to perfect Levine's concept are Brandon Moore and Eiki Martinson, graduate students at Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton, Fla. They have been working in conjunction with advisor Dr. Daniel Raviv, an electrical engineering professor.
Levine came up with the first version of the distillation process on paper, and the Florida team has taken it to another level, including creating a working apparatus.
The low-cost distillation process holds promise close to campus. South Florida has placed a moratorium on new construction because of limited water supplies.
The students entered their project in the 2006 Collegiate Inventors Competition®, a program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation, and were among the top seven finalists in the United States/Canada competition. This prestigious challenge recognizes and rewards the innovations, discoveries, and research by college and university students and their advisors for projects leading to inventions that can be patented.
"I made a promise to myself that before I die, I want to do something that helps other people. Here I am at 30, and I'm already doing that," Moore said.
"I've been able to build this incredibly eccentric machine, spill gallons of water everywhere, and generally act like the mad scientist I always wanted to be as a kid," Martinson said. "Best of all, we solved one of the big problems of today, with an invention that can save millions of lives around the world."
Now comes the hard part. The FAU team and Levine are working with power and water agencies to scale up the project to produce one million gallons of fresh water a day - enough to suit the daily needs of about 19,000 people.
