look over any type of description of a water treatment plant, as well as you’ll discover a description that includes the words, ‘coagulation tanks’. What are these treatment plants coagulating? You don’t want to know. exactly how are they doing it? With chemicals as well as minerals. Obviously, there’s something else that can be done.

For their Hackaday prize entry, [Ryan], [designbybeck], [Clint], [Wanda] as well as [Maker Mark] are investigating electrocoagulation. It’s an alternate to a frothy brew of chemicals that utilizes electricity to pull contaminants out of the water.

Right now, the tests are much smaller in scale than the tens of countless gallons you’d discover at a water treatment plant. In fact, the test rig is only a 16-ounce mason jar. While this isn’t big sufficient to precipitate contaminants out of a home water supply, it is huge sufficient for a proof of concept.

The team is utilizing two electrodes for this build, one aluminum, as well as one iron. These electrodes are linked via alligator leads to the electronics board they’ve built. This electronics board is basically just an H-Bridge (used so they can reverse the polarity of the field emitter as well as prevent a buildup of gunk on the electrodes) as well as a few connectors to a power supply. The results are encouraging; they have a few time-lapse videos of a mason jar of filthy water clearing up with the power of electricity. It’s a fantastic job with some fantastic documentation. The team already has a lot of updates on their job as well as directions on exactly how to replicate their hardware. You can inspect out those videos below.

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