Come join the MIT Water Club for a lunch time lecture from Sui Zhang, who will be presenting on "Theoretical and Experimental Study on the Chemo-Mechanical Coupling in Hydrogels for Salinity Gradient Energy Extraction." Free lunch will be provided! 

Salinity gradients between seawater and river water offer great potential for renewable energy production. The global salinity gradient energy is estimated to be 1.4-2.7 TW, which is comparable to the worldwide hydropower capacity (~1 TW). One route to achieve energy production from salty waters is by mechanical stress. Hydrogels are a group of materials that absorb water to different extents depending on salt concentration or mechanical stress. Hydrogels may offer other advantages such as less fouling and ease of cleaning. In this work, we explore the potential of hydrogels for energy production by thermodynamic analysis and experimental demonstration. 

Come take a break from preparing for finals and finishing off projects at the Water Club Lunch and Learn! This month's lunch and learn will feature a casual presentation from Water Club officer Samantha McBride, regarding water treatment in microgravity. As always, free lunch will be served!

Samantha is a PhD candidate at MIT in Course 2, and works with Professor Kripa Varanasi. In addition to her involvement with the MIT Water Club, Samantha is also the student president for the American Society of Space and Gravitational Research, and has experience in microgravity fluid mechanics research. 

Abstract: Water treatment for manned spaceflight is very important, as it is impossible to tap new water supplies while in space. Even for the International Space Station positioned in Low Earth Orbit, resupply missions are expensive so it is vital to recycle as much water as possible. While there are some expected differences to treating water in space vs. on the ground (ie, inability to use gravity-powered filtration or pumping), the water treatment systems on the ISS have shown some more surprising effects as well. I will discuss these surprising effects and give an overview of current research in microgravity/spaceflight water treatment!

Join the MIT Water Club for our open house this Thursday to celebrate the end of a successful academic year! With the support of our great student-led team, broader community, and industry sponsors, we had an awesome year and continued to bring people together to discuss water issues and how to solve them.

Whether you are just interested in one final social water gathering, or getting involved with the club next year, everyone is welcome! Light snacks and coffee will be provided. If you are potentially interested in joining us, please fill out this short survey (not a commitment): https://goo.gl/forms/kwUEzJfG1YuYozdE2

Water Night brings together researchers and industry professionals in the Boston area for a research showcase and provides a platform for individuals and groups to present their latest achievements in this field.

Click here to learn about how to submit an abstract and register to participate!

Come join the MIT Water club for our lunch and learn series, and get a free lunch! This month's seminar will be given by Anna Rogers on her research regarding over-extraction of groundwater in the role of triggering earthquakes. 

International Desalination Association’s Young Leaders Program (YLP) allows emerging desalination leaders to connect, advance their careers, and promote interest in desalination around the world. The goals of this exciting initiative are to help promote opportunities in the industry, support career advancement, and provide a forum for communication and the exchange of ideas among young professionals and the industry at large. Come join Simon Choong, the Regional Coordinator in North America, to learn more about the opportunities with YLP.

Cutting edge research surrounding interdisciplinary topics such as the food-energy-water nexus requires a combination of finding, managing, and analyzing data from multiple sources. This challenge has led the National Science Foundation to make strategic investments in developing community data tools that focus on water data because it is a central need for many of these research topics. CUAHSI (The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc.) is a non-profit organization funded by the National Science Foundation to aid students, researchers and educators in using and managing data to support their research in water resources.
 
This hands-on workshop will demonstrate data tools and resources that are available through the CUAHSI community that could help students, researchers, and educators discover new data, publish data, or collaborate with others around data and models. Participants will be guided through an activity that uses CUAHSI-supported tools and focuses on one water and energy related case study. 

Sign up here! 

Come join the MIT Water Club to hear a presentation on water research, and get a free lunch! This month's seminar will be given by Emily Tow, who will be presenting on "Energy Efficient Desalination and Water Reuse."

Prof. Lars Montelius, who is the CEO of the International Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) in Braga Portugal (www.inl.int), will speak on entrepreneurship opportunities and challenges at the nexus of the water and nano spaces.  Prof. Montelius has been a co-founder of 8 different nano companies one of which was directly focused on water purification (WaterSprint AB).  The INL offers scientists with an interest in the water sector an opportunity to prototype and commercialize their nano technologies using the extensive facilities at the INL.

To enter the competition, submit your statement of intent on mitwaterinnovation.org  by Dec 31: Visit mitwaterinnovation.org for more competition updates.

Yannis Orfanos from Harvard's Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure will be giving a lecture entitlted "Cities and Water Infrastructure: a systems-based approach". Lunch will be served. 

Like many fields, Hydrology and the related sciences have experienced a recent proliferation of data and data tools. This has led to innovative research and education that capitalize on these new resources in addition to new requirements from funding agencies like the National Science Foundation. CUAHSI, Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science is funded by NSF to support water research and education.

MIT Water Club will be hosting a workshop by Jon Pollack & Liza Brasil from CUAHSI as a part of the Lecture series.  The workshop involves demonstration of tools provided by CUAHSI for publishing and sharing data, models and code amongst researchers. Participants will be shown how to use web app for data discovery and feedback will be gathered. 

Coffee and refreshments will be provided!

About one in eleven people (660 million) still lack access to clean drinking water. Freshwater scarcity is projected to grow due to increased water demand and current climate change forecasts. As reverse osmosis (RO) has improved, coastal populations have been able to turn to desalination as a solution to their freshwater problems. A vast majority of the cost of RO water is due to capital costs and energy consumption, making it prohibitively expensive in some places. Since many RO plants are powered by fossil fuels, high energy consumption has an environmental cost as well. One option to reduce this cost is through innovations in process design. We accomplish this by splitting the standard single-stage RO system into two stages. We evaluate the energy savings achieved by moving from a single-stage RO system to an optimized two-stage RO system of equal size and productivity.

Lunch will be provided!

Come to learn more about water innovation, pitch your own idea, or network to find teammates. We will hear from speakers across sectors about the world’s water challenges and new innovations to address them. We also invite individuals or teams to pitch an idea (3-5 min) - we welcome anything water-related. Please e-mail waterinnovation@mit.edu if interested.

Visit www.mitwaterinnovation.org to register for the event!

Water Control Engineering for Agriculture and Food Security

Professor Chandra Madramootoo, McGill University, CEE Visiting Professor, J-WAFS Visiting Scholar

Room: 4-231

The demand for food will double over the next 25 years, and with the continuing loss of fertile, arable lands and limited supplies of freshwater for irrigation, this will place enormous pressures on our current food production systems. The situation is expected to exacerbate under climate change and the possibility of more frequent droughts in the arid and semi-arid tropics. One consequence of climate change is that in some irrigation schemes, there is no longer sufficient water for two cropping seasons per year. Cropping intensities are now lower. Additionally, in many of the large irrigated basins of the world, irrigation efficiencies are less than 40%, and water distribution within Canal Command Areas is improperly controlled, leading to inequality and conflicts amongst irrigators. The quality of drainage water in irrigated lands is also of much environmental concern given the growing problems of eutrophication and salinity.

The Seminar will discuss the above issues in more detail with reference to some irrigated basins in Canada, Central Asia, Egypt, India and Pakistan. Solutions such as Precision Irrigation, Drainage Water Control and Reuse, Water Conservation Engineering, and improvements in canal delivery systems, and on-farm water management will be presented.

Like many fields, Hydrology and the related sciences have experienced a recent proliferation of data and data tools. This has led to innovative research and education that capitalize on these new resources in addition to new requirements from funding agencies like the National Science Foundation. CUAHSI (The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc.) is a non-profit that receives funding to aid researchers and educators in using and managing data so that they can focus their efforts on doing and teaching science. This lecture will discuss the tools and support that are available through the CUAHSI community that could help you discover new data, publish your data, or collaborate with your colleagues (or students) around data and models

Presentation by Samantha McBride on endocrine-disrupting pollutants environmental fate and transport

Prakash is the founder and Chief Technical Officer at Gradiant Corporation, a technology-driven water company aimed at solving the world’s most challenging water treatment problems. The company’s flagship technology - Carrier Gas Extraction (CGETM) - was field demonstrated in the Permian basin in 2013 and has since won the 'Industrial Water Project of the Year' at the Global Water Awards 2014. Since then, two full-scale operating plants have been built and are operated for US oil field clients by Gradiant. Prakash is also the head of R&D at Gradiant and leads the team that is developing directional solvent extraction, ion caging, membrane based high salinity desalination, novel coagulation and on-the-fly disinfection techniques. Before founding Gradiant, Prakash was a PhD student in the Mechanical Engineering department at MIT perfecting the CGE technique for his thesis work. While at MIT, Prakash received the de Florez prize for graduate design, the Legatum fellowship for entrepreneurship and the best paper award at the IDA World Water Congress 2011. He has co-authored more than 30 international peer-reviewed publications and has filed more than 60 patents at the US PTO.

Waterfront cities face increasing challenges due to their relationship with water and the increasing threats of climate change, sea level rise, and more frequent and violent storms. Jason will present some of Sasaki's recent work combining research and practice of addressing these challenges and creating innovative solutions for the future, including the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Rebuild by Design Competition, NY Rising, and the Cedar Rapids Flood Recovery. Jason’s presentation will focus on Sasaki’s work with Memphis and Shelby County’s winning application to HUD’s National Disaster Resilience Competition, which created a holistic approach to water and city resilience.

On April 15, the MIT Water Club and the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering will host writer, lawyer, activist, and serial entrepreneur Seth Siegel – author of the New York Times bestselling book Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World. The event will feature a presentation by Siegel, followed by an opportunity for Q&A. Join us from 3-4 pm in 4-231 for this exciting event. More information on Siegel.

The MIT Water Innovation Prize is a solutions to market competition for water startups. Water MIT and regional teams compete for up to $30,000 in Innovation Grants, sponsored by PepsiCo and Veraqua. Christine Boyle, founder of Valor Water Analytics, will deliver a keynote along with the finalist teams of the 2015 Prize, AquaFresco and WellDone. Food will be served at 5:30 and the event will start at 6:00 in the MIT Stata Center (32-123).

Register at mitwaterinnovation.com.

Thanks to all who presented and attended the 4th annual MIT Water Night!

The MIT Water Night is our flagship research showcase that provides an energizing platform for individuals and research groups to present their latest achievements and work in water-related fields. 

We packed MIT's Walker Memorial with over 200 attendees, heard a great keynote by Dr. Matt Silver (MIT '01, CEO Cambrian Innovation), awarded prizes in five poster categories, and launched the first-ever Freshman Challenge (not to mention the first root beer and orange creamsicle float bar). See below for our winners.

This year we held the first ever MIT Freshman Challenge, sponsored by the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. For the competition, freshmen participants reviewed the posters at the event, chose one that most suited their interests, and proposed an idea or concept for future research or collaborations that would springboard off the posters presented. 

Download the 2016 abstract book HERE.

Desalination and Water Treatment
1st - Natasha Wright "Design of Village-Scale Electrodialysis Desalination Systems"
2nd - Emily Tow "Energy-mismatched solar desalination"

Earth and Oceans
1st - Deepa Rao "The Paradox of the Prochlorococcus: A trait-based approach to modeling ecotype niche differentiation via light and nutrient competition"
2nd - Clifford Goudey "Emission-Free Delivery of Fresh Water Using Solar P.V. and Drone Tugs" 

Teaching in Water, Management, and Human Development
1st - Mark Membreno "Bolivia Bioflush"
2nd - Hugh Magee "Pani Pati Guthi: Public Infrastructure for Community Resilience"

Water Chemistry and Nanotechnology
1st - Brendan Smith "Nanoporous Membranes for Water Filtration"
2nd - Bianca Chaves "Synergy Effect in the Oxidative Degradation of Organic Compounds using Ozonation Combined with Carbon Nanotube Electrochemically Active Filters"

Water Policy
1st - Alaa AlRadwan "Underworlds - A Smart-sewage Platform"
2nd - Sang Cho and Yannis Orfanos "Urban water system and green infrastructure: a data-driven approach"

Freshman Challenge
1st - Vivian Hwang
2nd - Videh Seksorla