Solar Pura is an appropriate technology project aiming to provide safe drinking water by harnessing the power of the sun. Around 2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water across the globe and many of them live in arid and remote areas perfect for the implementation of highly efficient, low cost, small-scale solar stills.

The journey undertaken over the last year began with the intention of harnessing the latent energy available in the environment to do something good in the world and novel in terms of technology. Through experiments and research, the project became fixated on solar distillation for clean water.

From that point, the research was informed by the large body of published academic work in the field and exploring the concept of the adjacent possible through combining ideas during rapid prototyping.

By developing an intimate understanding of the principles behind solar engineering in combination with an iterative experimental design approach, several novel concepts were explored. An optimal design was chosen based on contemporary criteria developed around emergency relief situations as part of the global water crisis.

The aim is for it the device to produce enough fresh water per day in a sunny climate for a small family’s needs. The design is optimised to be lightweight, low cost, robust and user-friendly. A scale functional prototype has been built and tested giving promising early results for this novel technology.