 All right. Well, hello, everyone. Good afternoon. Good evening or good morning, depending where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. We're pleased to bring you this month's installment of the E4C seminar series, which aims to intellectually develop the field of engineering for global development. As many of you are aware, we host a new research institution monthly to learn about their work, Advanced in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and beyond. Today's seminar is presented with Dr. Natasha Wright, who is the assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota. My name is Yana Aranda, and I am the president of Engineering for Change, and I'll be one of the moderators for today's seminar, along with my wonderful colleague and collaborator, Dr. Jesse Austin Brenerman, who is the assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. We're here. Here at his PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT and also holds an SM in mechanical engineering and a BS in ocean engineering from MIT. So thank you, Jesse. All right. The seminar you're participating in today will be archived on E4C site and our YouTube channel. Both of those URLs are listed on this slide. Information on Upping Seminars is available on our site. Any E4C members will receive invitations to upcoming seminars directly. If you have any questions, comments and recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact the Engineering for Change team at research at engineeringforchange.org. If you're following us on Twitter today, please join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C seminar series. We're also really keen to hear from you more generally about our suggested strategy, our topics for the future, the URL listed here for our survey, and this will also come up once the webinar, the seminar ends. 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As a note of events, I am really excited to invite you all to join us at our upcoming event, Impact Engineering. This will be a virtual event to taking place on December 3rd and 4th, where you can connect with leading social innovators across the engineering and technology sectors who are solving urgent global challenges. Our programming will focus on ecosystems for social impact, improving lives and livelihoods through enterprise, and the role of engineering associations and academic institutions in driving sustainable development. Registration is free. We're so excited to be able to deliver this to our broad audience this year, typically hosted in New York City, but now will be online and we hope that all of you will join us. Please register at impactengineer...impact-engineer.org. The URL is listed here. So with that, I think it's time to move on to some important housekeeping items before we start. We'd like to make sure that typically we used to say practice using Zoom, but I think in this instance, we have all had lots of practice using Zoom. But I would like to invite you all to type in your location into our chat window, which is located at the bottom right of your screen. So just let us know where you're joining us from today. Alright, we have...I'm in Brooklyn, so there's my type in as well. So we have folks from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Missouri, Utah, Alberta, Canada, San Diego, Spain, and more Michigan and Maine, South Carolina I'm seeing here, India. Several from India. New Brunswick. Oh, welcome, New Brunswick. I'm originally from Toronto. Nice to see you guys here. First time having, I think, in my experience, I'm a reply from New Brunswick. Welcome. And believe it or not, I've been to Darwat, India. So welcome. See folks from Toronto and Florida, Egypt and Germany. We're so excited to have you here. Please do share where you're from. The chat window can be used for any remarks you might have during the seminar. And if you have technical questions, you can also feel free to send a private chat to the Engineering for Change admin. If you're listening to our broadcast and have any troubles, try opening up in a different browser as well. That might help. All right. And during our seminar, if you have any questions, please kindly do type those questions into our Q&A box, which is really important because we do aggregate those questions and anything that's not answered. We will have our speaker address those and potentially publish them on our platform afterwards. So it's really important for us that you do and put your questions into the Q&A. And also helps us to keep all those questions organized. So welcome everyone from all over the world. It is now my deep pleasure to introduce to you our speaker, Dr. Natasha Wright. As I mentioned, she is at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her research and teaching interests include membrane based separation processes, salination, photovoltaic and solar thermal water treatment, design ethnography and the role of engineering and global development. She completed her PhD in the Global Engineering and Research Lab at MIT in 2018 and developed a semester course engineering and development at Tufts University. She was awarded the Lemelson-MIT Award for Graduate Inventors, was listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Energy and Energy List, and led the team that won the USAID D-Cell Prize in 2015. Natasha received her BSME from the University of St. Thomas St. Paul, Minnesota. Natasha, I'm going to stop sharing my screen, turn it over to you and again a warm welcome. Unmute here, one second here. There you go, coming up. We had this work in, there we go. You're seeing my slide there for me? Yep, looks good. Awesome. Okay, so thank you very much for the introduction, Yana. I don't know that I need to add a whole lot to that introduction. I would say that most of the work or all of the work that is in present tense that I'll be representing today is done at the University of Minnesota. Much of the desalination work that I'll be presenting was done when I was a member of the Global Engineering and Research Lab at MIT. That's the gear lab and the PI for that lab is Amos Winter. And so I just used the word desalination system. And as I've watched some of the previous seminars as part of the series, I've noticed that this idea of systems thinking has been really prevalent. And when we think about a desalination system, that can mean a lot of different things. So first of all, in this photo, the desalination part, the part that's actually removing salt from water is actually inside this trailer. So in some ways that in and of itself is the desalination system. However, usually when I reference that I'm referring not just to the membrane separation processes or the process that's removing the salt. I'm actually also referring to the energy system in the water energy nexus as we like to call it. And I may also be referring or maybe I should be referring to where the water is coming from, where the wastewater is going, and where the clean water or safe drinking water is being transferred to people who need it. And so in this case when I think about these aspects of a desalination system, I like to think about the boundaries of that system. And I think as an engineer, but not as a systems designer or a systems engineer per se. I still need to think about the system and what the boundaries of it are. And that's going to be a big theme throughout my talk. Specifically, I'm going to think about the boundaries of my system. I'm going to think about what stakeholders need to be considered within the boundaries of that system. And I'm going to think about how much I, as a mechanical engineer in my case, need to know about the system in order to have a positive impact or hopefully have a positive impact. And so to do that, I'm going to be working with sort of the following process. So on the left here we have where I often start projects, which is that I have identified an impact area that I'm excited about I'm interested in, and that it has a skill set that might be relevant to my training. And that's different for everyone that's joining us here on the call today. That skill set that you have and why you think you're interested. So I'm then going to work on defining the system. And when I do that the first time, I'm going to do that a bunch of times that's why there's a back arrow. I'm going to do that with one or two what I call strategic stakeholders. So that's not all of my stakeholders and often it's not even the end user of the technology. But it's someone who I've chosen as a strategic stakeholder because they know something about the system as a whole. So I'm going to work on identifying where there might be technical challenges in this case technical challenges because I'm coming from an engineering background for others of you that might be a policy challenge for example, and what the key limitations might be. If that still aligns with my skill set, I'm going to continue and I'm going to continue looping back and forth between defining the system and defining the problems with more and more and more stakeholders. And as a result, this piece of the process usually takes me six or more months. Additionally, I like to think about this system in terms of when I engage stakeholders. So early on in the process that very first step it's it's me or my group of students that I'm working with, thinking about these impact areas, and then bringing in again that one to two strategic stakeholders, and then bringing in a lot of stakeholders when I go back to concept development, I'm usually working with fewer and then larger again. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about how we engage these different partners and stakeholders throughout the process. To do that I'm going to talk about my background in desalination and when I first started looking at desalination I actually was interested in water treatment more broadly. And that strategic partner that strategic stakeholder that our lab group at MIT had identified was a company called Jane irrigation. They're an irrigation company they do things with primarily with agriculture what they were interested in understanding household water filtration for biological contaminants. So thinking about that problem, we had some concepts and some ideas of what that system looked like household water purification. When I then went and expanded my stakeholder network that meant that I met with a variety of different groups in India, that includes individuals families community groups village governance NGOs etc you can see the list there. And so over the course of about six months, I met with a variety of different groups and one of those set categories was community groups. And they're showing me with one of those community groups in India. And specifically this was a group of adult women. And they're showing me a two part filter here, it's a gravity fed filter so waters put in the top and it comes out the bottom. And the big part that came out of this conversation and other conversations with community members or the end user was that they actually often did have access to or knew about household water filtration devices, but weren't using them. And I started to ask questions about why they weren't using them or, you know, what, what they did use them for in that case. I started to hear things like, Well, my water makes it hard to digest my water taste bad it ruins my cookware and it tastes salty. Importantly, they, they seem to associate the plastic ones which would be associated perhaps with higher quality as still having the same salty taste. Well, there's a reason for that and that's because all of these filters don't remove salt. And so one question that came about was well how many people actually have access to these filters how many people are treating their water, even though there are this many literally hundreds of home filter options available. And so it turns out that it according to the 2018 National Family Health data that about 70% of the population is rural population in India is not treating their drinking water. Again, even though there actually are a variety of resources available. And my hypothesis was that part of that might be because these home filters don't remove salt and maybe salts a prevalent issue in India. So next we started looking at well how much salt is actually in the water in India and is this is this really an issue or or my misunderstanding what they mean by salty. And so what I found is that around 60% of the land area in India is underlying with groundwater with salt contents above the recommended level of around 500 milligrams per liter. That's everything that's red, yellow and green on this map. Additionally, that really only matters if people are using groundwater. That's a common theme, at least when I'm teaching in students is like well why do we care that the groundwater salty if no one's using it. We know that people are using it about 60% again of the rural population from that same National Family Health Survey show that folks are using their groundwater as their primary drinking water source. Another 33% is piped a portion of that at least would also be from a groundwater source. Importantly, in the 2018 Family Health Survey, we started to see for the very first time, community RO plants, having a really small portion of that pie RO is reverse osmosis which I'll talk about in a second to desalination technique. So groundwater salinity in India is an issue. I want to pause for just a second and actually make a call out on this topic of chemical contamination to an annual review. This is published by Susan Amros Katya, Chairman McMillie and myself in the annual review of environmental and resources of environment and resources. And what we did is we looked at global groundwater contamination and specifically the co the co prevalence of these various or co contamination of various water sources. We looked both at the global population of risk, as well as the technologies that are used to mitigate these and places around the world so this is in a preview format right now on their website and I'm going to be coming back to this study a few times throughout. When we have chemical contamination, I'm focusing predominantly on TDS or salt contamination which is these kind of big black square boxes in this map, but we're often interested in this issue of co contamination with other other chemicals as well. And when that happens, we often want a technology that's considered kind of across the board to get a lot of things out. And one of those is reverse osmosis. So reverse osmosis is a pressure driven process in which you use a pump to apply a pressure to a membrane and get clean water out of the other side. One of the biggest companies in India that is doing this in rural communities at a smaller for small scale plants is taught up projects. This is one of their systems that's fairly representative of a number of the systems I've seen of theirs across the country. And the reason I point this system out is because it's actually been quite successful. They've had over 2000 on grid reverse osmosis plants installed at least as the last time I checked a few months ago. And importantly, they were able to achieve economic viability with this system or economic sustainability, let's say. And so what that means is that not only were they able to recover the operating cost of the system, but they actually were also able to recover the capital cost of the system. And that's challenging in international development technologies. Frequently, maybe you're trying to cover just the operation cost or maybe you're not trying to cover any of it. But the fact that they were able to create a viable business model drew me to them as a potential stakeholder as a potential partner in this work. The issue that they do have, however, is that a number of their clients, a number of the people that they were trying to work with, wanted a system that they could use in their community, which was either off grid or some intermittent energy supply. And the issue that they had is that when they moved this the same RO plant off grid and attached to photovoltaic or a solar power system that they were no longer economically viable because the capital cost was too high and they could no longer hit the three year payback period time period that the money lenders required. So that's for a few reasons for folks that know something about reverse osmosis. The biggest reason is that they were recovering, were covering a low amount of water, in part because they were using low efficiency and low pressure or lower pressure pumps. And the reason that Tata projects is using those is because getting high efficiency pumps at a small volume or not small volume as in number of plants but small volume as in small size scale of the plant itself is very expensive. So those pumps that are high efficiency like the ones you read about in academic literature are a couple thousand dollars just for the pump itself. So in order for them to get low cost pumps, they were low efficiency pumps. And as a result, these plants where this reverse osmosis plant was less efficient than some of those ideal numbers you see in the literature. So, we're thinking about this problem, there's maybe a lot of different ways we could go we could think about redesigning that pump, a low cost pump we could think about using a different technology, we could think about implementing some sort of energy recovery device to recover the pressure. And those are all different technical challenges now that are in my mind at this point in the project. So I start looking more and I'm going to go back to the literature and I'm thinking more about that map that I saw with groundwater salinity. And we think about the fact that these areas of groundwater salinity actually overlap quite nicely with two other maps. One is the map of water stress in India, where you tend to have higher groundwater salinity and areas of high water stress. And therefore you want likely want to make sure that your recovery of your system is high, which means that the most water I can that I put in as feed water I get back as clean drinking water. And third that there's intermittent but on grid electricity, the intermittent on grid electricity could be paired with these high solar resources and a photovoltaic powered system. And so we're maybe looking for a solution that pairs well with solar. Some technologies do that better than others. So as part of this process I started looking at a technique called electro dialysis, and I'm not going to get into any equations or details but for those of you that are on the call because you're interested in desalination I want to provide a little bit about how that works. So electro dialysis is a process in which you flow water, salty water through an anode and a cathode. And so the cathode here is on the left and it's negatively charged. So I'm showing a bunch of positive and negative anions and cations on the screen here as well. You can think of a cation like sodium in your table salt at home, you can think of an anion like chloride in that table salt at home. And so my cation being positively charged is going to be attracted towards my cathode positive to negative and my anion towards my anode. So after I did this all of my charge would get stuck to those electrodes, and that's actually its own desalination process which we can get into at a later time if you'd like. In electro dialysis instead we introduce a series of membranes called cation and anion exchange membranes, and what makes them special is that they only allow one of the two types of charge to pass. So for example my cation is going to be attracted towards my cathode, and it's allowed to go that way, because it's going through a cation exchange membrane. But when it gets to this anion exchange membrane it's going to be blocked, because it can't go through one that only passes anions. And so if you look carefully at what that means on your positives and negatives and all sides is that I'm going to end up clearing out certain channels I'm going to dilute it of salt. I create what's called my dilute. And when I concentrate my salt on the other channels I'm going to create my concentrate. Okay, so that's a little bit of introduction to what electro dialysis is which is the technology that we ended up working on. I want to say that I didn't invent this technology. This has been around since the 1950s. So the question then is, you know, as engineers as academics, what did we do that wasn't just installing this technology. There are a number of different things we did as a group that I'm going to highlight just briefly. So in most of these systems I showed those membranes and those membranes in the picture on the right, for example, which is a stack from ion tech are usually kind of squished between these two or sandwich between these two big electrodes which are the metal plates on the end. And you can see that that membrane is pretty long, these ion tech membranes are about two meters, one and a half to two meters long. And so as a result, my water as it flows down this membrane is getting less and less salty. If I look at that kind of in color terms, that means that my dilute as I go from dark blue to light blue is getting less salty, and my concentrate is getting more salty because I'm putting the salt from here into here. Okay, now the issue and the in the most of the innovations that came out of our lab at MIT regarding this particular technology was recognizing that this means that I can apply more current at the top of my stack than I can at the bottom. And as a result, I'm currently wasting a lot of the capacity that my membrane has. And so a few of the different ways that we approach this just as an example is first that we looked at voltage control in batch and continuous systems. And so if I can control the voltage I'm applying at every instant in time, in order to match the voltage I should be applying I can adequately use all of my membrane area, and I can reduce the amount of area I need and therefore the cost. So that was part of my that was worked on by Sahil Shah and the gear them as part of my own work. I looked at spiral wound modules, which allowed me to have an inner and an outer electrode. And because of the way that the geometry worked I was applying the right current at the right time. And then we're also looking and they are continuing to look a lot at the coupling of photovoltaic systems with desalination systems. So as not to waste this peak of solar energy in the middle of the day, but rather to use that energy to apply voltage and flow rate when it's needed. So with these types of innovations we've been pushing to pilot technologies in a variety of different places around the world. The first one as was mentioned in the introduction was the USA desal prize which took place in New Mexico again this was done with my partner Jane irrigation systems. And as part of that prize we were evaluated on product water quality production rate recovery of these systems. One was messy. If you look in the photo in the bottom. There's tubes going everywhere there's probably tripping hazards. There's batteries that aren't really covered in a way that would be maybe safe for a minimally trained operator to operate. So this is the first pilot that we built. We then went on to do two different systems, one in Jalgao and one in Shluru India that were focused on understanding operation maintenance and performance. So, for example, the one on the left was completely automated whereas the one on the right was completely manual in which the operator had to physically change the flow valves during certain parts of the day. So we use these pilots to learn a question to answer questions about that. So this project now, well as I mentioned, because of Tata projects role in doing rural desalination work, I was interested in continuing to work with them to develop this technology. And so Tata projects is still currently looking to commercialize this technology. The first way that they're hoping to do that is actually in these facilities that they call TQ malls, which are at gas stations around the country on the left hand side there you can have water spickets where folks can come up and fill a water container. And then the system that goes in there the latest sort of pilot system that we developed in India is shown here on the left, and it fits actually the other direction sideways right in the end of that TQ mall that's what that footprint is for. So that's kind of where we're at right at the moment with that project as a whole. Now I mentioned, however, this is now when I transitioned out of MIT I'm still working with your lab on some of these ideas and topics but when I've transitioned from MIT to the University of Minnesota. I went back and I thought about again the system. So I had been thinking about during that time period, the desalination part which is in the trailer, and the energy part which is outside the solar power. But we started to think about what happens if I change the boundaries of my system to also think about where the water is coming from, how the safe waters conveyed to the consumer, and where the brine goes. This became particularly interesting when I started at the University of Minnesota and was in a conversation with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. The MPCA is interested in desalination in Minnesota, even though we're like land of the 10,000 fresh lakes, because we also put a lot of chloride in our water, because we have winters, and we put salt on the road. And because we put a lot of salt sulfate in the water, which hurts our wild rice crop which is very Minnesota specific crop. As a result, salty water has become a very big issue in Minnesota, so much that the MPCA actually commissioned a report to see if it would be economically feasible to desalinate in Minnesota. So it's not just a California, Florida, Texas problem anymore. But what they found is that while it is technologically possible, as we all know to desalinate, it involves extreme what they call extreme technologies like reverse osmosis, as well as evaporation and crystallization of the brine. And the reason the report highlighted that so much is because they found that, on average, the brine treatment would actually be 63% of the capital cost and 91% of the O&M. That's huge. And so when I saw those numbers backing up the fact that we didn't know what to do with the brine in India either. This idea that, you know, a small change in energy consumption of the desalination system itself is much, it has a lesser effect than if I can create an energy reduction in the brine management. So that's how we transitioned kind of broadening the system boundaries to start thinking about that piece of the puzzle. So again, that where we draw the system boundaries, not only is key for understanding of the technical, economic and political barriers. In this case, I expanded the boundary and I was like, hey, brine might actually be a bigger issue here. And second, because it also affects how we compare potential technologies. And so this is where I'm going to go back to that review paper that I mentioned. And then we looked at contaminants all around the world and we looked at efficacious piloted technologies. So these are piloted technologies in an international development context. Now you're going to look at this graph and there's a lot of dots that relate to different contaminants in the treatment approaches. And you're going, you might be saying, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to get out of these graphs. And the, that's kind of the point of these graphs, that there, there isn't a trend, really. In that we might think, hey, if there's a lot more arsenic in the water, it's more expensive to treat or maybe people will report that if the system is a lot bigger. It'll be less expensive due to economy of scale. The fact that we don't see those trends either means that that relationship doesn't exist, which to be honest probably isn't true or at least not fully true. What's more likely is that it means that all of these authors around the world are comparing cost on completely different terms. And so if we think about just those points on the plot related to reverse osmosis treatment of high salinity, then there's the papers that are shown here. And we see that everyone is basing their cost estimate, we look at levelized cost of water, which is dollars per liter, for example, using very different metrics. So some people consider the installation costs some don't only three of these papers consider the cost of waste management or dealing with that brine stream I was talking about. Only one of them actually considered the energy considered to needed to lift water from the well. Okay, so this is one piece that I'm just putting out there as a research question or food for thought for the community is to say how do we how do we avoid this because we this is one of the metrics that we hear about all the time my my technology is cheaper. How do we clearly and concisely define the bounds that we used in on that system analysis in a way that allows us to actually compare and to understand what to use because I think as a practitioner who just knows that their community needs desalination. We're going to look at this graph and maybe we say oh yeah we should definitely use or end system because it's definitely cheaper. Maybe, maybe not right and I think that's something that we need to think really deeply about. So as I mentioned, this membrane treatment, whether that's electro dialysis reverse osmosis or any other desalination process is going to result in a brine stream that's heavily concentrated with cells. And so one of the big things that my research group and specifically two of my students, Matthew chosen Mustafa Kadura have been working on is where that brine should go and what we should do with it. And the question is what do we do. So in India right now to clarify don't even have a picture because what's happening is it's getting dumped on the ground in rural small scale systems. So one question is what do we do with it here and in the US for our systems are typically bigger. This is a system in New Mexico, coming out of a, out of a desalination plan to where the brine management is happening by thermal evaporation and crystallization. And then based on those numbers I showed before the energy to do this is about 20 times more than the energy for the diesel itself. Installing a plant like this just by looking at it even if we made it super tiny is likely not a viable option in some of the communities that we work in. Just because of the complexity of the system because of the maintenance that's involved with a system like this. Maybe it is. That's what we're looking at. Another option typically is to do something like an evaporation pond. These are evaporation ponds at the Dead Sea which are pretty famous which is why I chose that picture, but essentially to dig a hole to line that hole appropriately such that contaminants don't get into the ground, and then to use that to either collect the salt or whatever it is you're trying to do from your pond. The problem with doing that is that it's not a minimal amount of area, which is hard to see from an aerial shot. So for example, if we replace the plant on the left with land area for an evaporation pond, we would need a lot of area. But it's not just one American football field. It's actually 100 American football fields to do what that one plant can do. And that is for a big plant. Even if we look at those little tiny D cell plants that I showed early on that ton of projects is making, you would still need one or two football fields of area in order to evaporate the brine that's coming out of that. And that land isn't free that land is being formed by folks that land has all sorts of purposes. So the question is what do we do instead. So I'm only going to give kind of a preview of what my group's working on. But as far as going back to that fundamental physics like we talked about, we can think about, well, what's making it take so much land area and what causes what enhances evaporation. Evaporation is driven, the rate of evaporation is driven by four primary properties, the area surface area that's available, the air speed flowing over the pond, the temperature of the air and of the fluid and the humidity. And it's not to increase the top three and decrease the bottom one in order to enhance evaporation. So if you're looking at increasing area only and allowing the other three things to happen naturally, you get a technology that was developed out of Bangor University by Jack Goran and his team called wind aided intensified evaporation. And this is a very promising technology they have a company both in India and in the US now looking at using the natural power of the wind to evaporate water. The challenge on our end of course is that you don't always have the space available, particularly when it's a high humidity area, or when you have cooler temperatures. So in our group we're looking at kind of bird's eye view of what we're trying the direction we're headed is how can we couple essentially the wind aided intensified evaporation system with a system that enhances evaporation when it's needed using the other three systems. So what if we could increase wind speed or increase airspeed by introducing a fan only at times of high or low humidity. And what if we could provide control of the incoming brine temperature via use of solar thermal collectors or other systems in order to minimize the amount of area that's needed and therefore the capital cost at any given time. This is sort of the direction we're heading right now with some of the brine evaporation work that we're doing. I'm going to move on to and hopefully I can cover this last topic quickly so that we still have time for questions but since it was in the title. I want to talk a little bit about how this is related to dialysis and why that came up. I was in a mentor meeting just with a friend and colleague of mine who's a mentor she worked at the VA for a long time. And we were talking about all sorts of random things when she turned to me and she goes so electric dialysis is that is that anything like dialysis. And I said dialysis you mean that thing that's used to treat kidney disease and she was like yeah dialysis, you know it's pretty expensive. I don't know but let me look into it. And so that perked my, perked my interest, and I started looking at what dialysis is and when it's needed. So dialysis is used in two primary cases one is an end stage renal disease when the kidneys no longer function and long term dialysis or a kidney transplant is needed for survival. It's also can be used for acute kidney injury when there's a sudden episode of kidney failure in that case you're usually on this treatment for less time. In the United States, taxpayers pay about 53.6 billion a year in dialysis, 800 million a year for the VA high mortality rate within a year. However, the case is even more dire in Sub-Saharan Africa where there's an 88% mortality rate within three months of starting dialysis, primarily due to the cost of treatment. I started seeing review papers and statistics that looked at this and, and I became interested. I identified an impact area that I thought I might have a skill set in. And I needed to think more about if my skill set actually mattered. I started to look at how dialysis works, essentially in classic chemo dialysis which is the most prevalent for me is around the world. Blood leaves your body through a catheter that can be placed in a number of different places. That blood then runs through what's called the dialysizer membrane. On one side of the membrane is your blood. On the other side of the membrane is the dialysate fluid. And that fluid has a special combination of salts and sugars that allows for the right amount of diffusion to happen between that fluid and the blood. And so I looked at this and I said, I know stuff about membranes. I know stuff about how to reduce energy consumption membrane systems. I know how to make that process smaller. Maybe I could make that module smaller. I probably can kind of looking at some of the physics. And then I said, but before I do any of that, I need to figure out who my partners are and who my primary stakeholders are right. And so I looked at my first strategic partner to help me guide if this is, is this anything of the right or my anywhere close to the right direction. I used to two doctors. One is Dr. Abraham McKinney, who's a physician who is visiting our university in our medical device innovation program. He's now a researcher in my lab. You got to keep your keep your partners close when you find good ones. You have to find a way to keep them around to strengthen the project. And the second is Dr. Bello, who's an nephrologist, one of only a few nephrologists in all of Nigeria. So talking to them and within the first month we realized is that I needed to expand my system boundary beyond the hemodialysis system to look at other types of dialysis as well, even though they're not prevalent currently in Sub-Saharan Africa and Nigeria specifically. One of the things that they suggested that I expand the system to is to include peritoneal dialysis. In this system, the dialysis fluid goes into your abdominal cavity. And because they're fluid, because your membrane in your body itself is a semi permeable membrane, you actually get those salts and sugars and water going in the direction it's supposed to by the natural membrane in your body. The benefit of this is that you don't need that big machine, you just need the bag of fluid to be put in your body and then to be able to drain that bag of fluid. As a result, it can often be done at home, and it's usually less expensive and studies in countries that have both of these technologies available. Okay, so I've met with my primary stakeholders, I found out from them I need to think about a bigger system. And so now I'm going to rapidly increase the number of stakeholders that I'm talking to. And I did that, my team did that over a process of two different field visits, one in November of 2019 and one in January of 2019. We interviewed a few different groups. The first was that we did a more formal rigorous design ethnography study. And so we had 33 patients at three hospitals. We actually audio recorded the conversations transcribed them and coded them using in vivo software, which is more of an ethnographic style of analysis. We did descriptive and emotion based coding to develop formal themes that came out of that conversation. If you look at just a single person's transcript and do a word cloud you'll see things come out like time and hours, more so actually than cost. We started doing this more in depth analysis of the language used, we were able to pull out themes related to cost, but where time was actually a big portion of that cost which I'll talk about a little more in a second. The importance of the family and how when we described the way that parts Neil dialysis works, the feelings of independence as well as apprehension that came with that. So that was time important. Just as to ground that a little bit we found that some people took 10 hours to get to the clinic and it took some hours, some folks seven hours. That's an average of it was an average of two and a half hours over the course of all of the patients, they then had to do blood work they had to do a four hour treatment. They did transportation on the way home that time was for one way. That means that it took between four and 20 plus hours for a single session. You had to do three sessions a week, most people couldn't afford to do three sessions a week but that's what you're supposed to do. And it's not just you it's also a family member because you're required to have a family member in the room for with you when you do this treatment. So if you need to adults going to the hospital three times a week for anywhere between four and a half to 20 plus hours, it's pretty hard to keep a job. And as a result, the financial burden isn't just the cost of the treatment itself, it's the time to do the treatment. So this really is what pushed us not to try to make him a dialysis cheaper, but to say how can we make peritoneal dialysis and or some other home based therapy feasible in this context. So transitioning to that we focused again this is peritoneal dialysis the one that we're focused on now. In addition to patients, like I said often the patient isn't even your most critical stakeholder. We also interviewed a variety of other folks medical doctors nephrologist nurses etc. As a result of those conversations, not only did we want to focus on PD or peritoneal dialysis which is what the patients told us, but we again had to change our system boundary to include the peritoneal dialysis supply chain. And the reason for that is that what what all of these folks told us is that they have the capabilities to do PD they don't have the supplies to do it. And when you import peritoneal dialysis fluid, it expires quickly and when it gets stuck at the at customs coming across the border coming in at port it expires you can't use it. And so it was only viable if we could find a way to make the fluid itself other parts they could import the fluid itself available locally. Pima dialysis cost was driven by transportation nurses etc whereas peritoneal dialysis if we found that locally the cost was driven by access to this fluid. And so, currently what we're looking at then is what would it take to generate and or recycle dialysis fluid in decentralized facilities think hospitals think people's homes, or even on someone's belt that's how like an insulin pump. It is essentially an artificial pancreas this would be like an artificial kidney to enable parents meal dialysis. And right now we think the easiest way to enter that conversation is to be looking specifically at how do we generate decentralized PD fluid within the hospital. Going back I mentioned that we're always rechecking. Now that we've redefined the problem is this something we should still be answer our group should still be answering versus just someone else in the world. Currently, even though we didn't end up looking at the hemodialysis membrane in order to produce PD fluid you need water for injection water for an injection at the hospital is still desalination and water treatment in a place with intermittent energy. So luckily that's something our group already does. The combination combining salts and sugars with water is actually just the inverse physics of separating water and sugar salts and sugar with water. And so we feel there's still a role that our group can play in actually developing the system in in hospitals. And so right now we're kind of where that red line is in the design process. So with that, I want to leave you with those same three questions I posed at the beginning. How do we think about the boundaries of your system and how is that defining the technical solutions that you're seeing might need to occur. So stakeholders are needed, and are to be considered as part of my system. Do I who how many do I need to talk to and with what depth for each stakeholder. And how much do I as an engineer need to know about the system in order to have an impact. How much time should I spend doing that how much how many resources should I put towards doing. So I thought I'd like to thank my sponsors as well as the rest of the team at the University of Minnesota and MIT for having this work come together, and I am happy to take questions. Thank you, Dr right Natasha. I overlapped with you obviously, and it was at the year lab and have been enriched just by listening to you talk about your work ever since that point in time and I'm always hearing new things that are very exciting and inspiring certainly to sleep into analysis and thinking about other stakeholders and I also want to thank you for articulating in an explicit way sort of what your progress for a project is, and where you are thinking about that sort of explicitly I think that we often get into the technical details in engineering. And I think that this is just as an important a part of the academic process how do we determine what questions we're answering, are asking, and then how do we answer them within the context of applied work, which is what we do in engineering. So very exciting to hear that. I'm glad that we have the seminar series to get a chance to talking we have some questions coming in. A lot of them are, you know, thinking both about the system questions that you asked. I want to be clear here and talking with Natasha, ahead of this, this seminar. This generally when we have these seminars we have sort of questions and it's sort of a one way like we're asking you something you're giving us your expertise. But I think that Natasha was requesting that you guys do add more. Sorry, this is my dog does not like the mailman. So unfortunately what happens during COVID you get to hear his excitement. Really wants to have more of a two way flow of information where you are looking for feedback you've talked about some work you did before, talking about new work and and moving forward you want to engage the community not just in asking you questions, but in helping you get feedback as where should you set the boundary like where would people suggest. So I think more than just asking questions for her expertise if you could add things if you have suggestions for what you might do and to start with that. I'll credit Benjamin crane here but one of the one of the questions was have you thought about lifecycle analysis, or any of those other techniques that look more at the, you know, you talked about operations and management, but sort of the life cycle for your system itself rather than just the water piece of it. So even for that life cycle you have to set the boundary right and how far back you go. Yes, it's not work that I've typically done myself but that I've partnered to do so on the PV powered electrolysis for example there's a paper on our Gaza system, written by dev who's a professor now out of Denmark. So that's on the Gaza I'm happy to share that if you leave it I can leave that paper in the comments that does a life cycle analysis on the PVED stuff with wastewater treatment stuff in the US. For example, starting a new collaboration, working with Jeremy guest study University of Illinois, who does full life cycle analysis in that work. So, when I, I do system optimization and I involve different variables as part of that sometimes there's environmental pieces of that sometimes it's just energy and but for the nitty gritties of that I tend to partner with folks who have an expertise in it. Yeah, thank you so so again important to have the right people on the team to do the type of work that you want them to do so I think that's a really good insight but also I think you know as someone else who also does optimization I think that it can be difficult to understand when we're drawing the system batteries just making that system more complex and it's all coupled becomes harder to find solutions. So I think this is one of the key discussions that we have to have as a community is sort of really understanding, you know we want to have the system models and understand emergent behavior and effects. I want to ask question related to that. A lot of people are asking sort of, you know, okay we you've drawn these boundaries around the systems you're getting this this Brian or thinking about how do we manage that you mentioned only a few of the papers dealt with sort of the Brian management like what do you do with this waste. And we had a specific question about that so I was wondering if you talk a little bit more about sort of these interactions between okay like we have this system we can optimize it for energy or for power for cost. But there may be some of these more whether it's lifecycle or the Brian management like we have all this salt now. What do we do with it. Can you talk about some of those effects in terms of, hey we might solve this problem for making the water at an economical price point. Yeah, we've created how do you think about whether they're intended or unintended consequences of some of these byproducts on some other, you know, dimension that we is not directly the water recovery. Yeah, so I think to clarify like from the from the beginning when we started looking at desalination we knew the Brian would be an issue right we knew there wasn't anywhere to put it. The communities told us that the communities told us that they would just dump it on the ground. Part of the issue is that we don't have good quantification of the effect of doing that, particularly for these really small systems. We have a lot of good data in the desalination community around what happens when you dispose of Brian improperly improperly back into the sea how that might affect marine life, for example, that the information around that is starting to grow. What happens when you dump a little bit of Brian right outside your building in a rural community, is that an issue or not. And so, part of this is that when the conversation first started, the government wasn't regulating it in India. It was a small enough volume and the person that owned the land didn't seem to care, and whatever. And so part of it was through conversations and discussing it. That was sort of the direction that we went knowing that eventually we would need to think more about that as an issue. And then I think for me once I started realizing that this Brian management is an issue and desalination but it's also an issue for industry. Chromium plating is a big one in India, textile industry, where they also have these really selling brands where where that's not either an option or acceptable and where the federal government is starting to regulate it. So I started to drive that conversation more about how do we actually involve that in the model, and how do we start bringing that in to the cost estimation, estimation. I think for me when you. The question is how far out you go so for example do you also look at the energy embedded in the creation of the solar panel, etc. That to me is when it gets with outside the scope a little bit of my expertise in my area and when I try to partner with others to look at those effects, versus when it's still in this water space what happens to clean water where does it come from and what happens to the Brian, all, all are directly inputs and outputs of that desalination system that that do need to be considered should be considered holistically. So I would actually argue that every single one of those desalination papers because they were pilots, not lab studies should have said what they did with the Brian and what it cost them. So I think there are some boundaries that that we as a community need to define like this should be part of your analysis and we should be doing it in the same way. Yeah, sorry, I don't know if that's a great. There's a lot of people on the car and I think they're interested in your work because they are working practitioners in the nation, or actually getting or in water treatment, we're getting a lot of questions. I don't have a lot of time left, but getting a lot of questions around perhaps different technologies, other than desalination, working in conjunction with reverse osmosis or, you know, some of these other ones that are, you know, if you read the desalination journal, you know there's lots of models and technologies that are being developed all the time. And I think one of the things that I would like to ask you about in terms of your project trajectory is in that we're looking at these pilots, these are projects with practitioner partners, right industry partners. And we have these different technologies that may or may not be commercial, you know, commercialized, commercializable, I don't know, cannot be easily depending on different factors. I, what I'm hearing and what you're saying I'd like you to talk a little bit about is, is there a role for the academics so you were like developing new technologies right we're looking at different ways of putting these systems together and things we can do with geometry etc. But you were talking about perhaps there's a lack of information and data for systems in emerging markets right so when we're thinking about the development context. It sounds like okay well if we're doing a really large desalination plan in San Diego and we're thinking about what is the effects when we put it into the ocean. Okay we have all these studies that have looked into that. And like what is the, can I predict the impact of putting a little bit of salt in a lot of decentralized places across a larger area. That might be a problem or might not be a problem I don't know. And I think that that is a problem across lots of sectors not just water is this existing data empirical models which is a lot of our engineering knowledge. We haven't done for these cases where the, the artifact or the project or the system is in a very different context right. And so I was wondering if you, how, how do you approach like, try and answer that question whether it's the Brian one in India or any of the you've showed a lot of charts of things happening in India, but I assume that that data was either is doesn't exist for everything right like maybe it exists for groundwater but there's lots of things that you may want to know. But don't doesn't exist right that the data doesn't exist. So I was wondering how you approach that and thinking about developing the context of the system and developing that system model. And some of the challenges that you've run into doing that and then I think we can we can end it there. So I would say that first and foremost that these stakeholders, even if they don't become a partner. So there is a difference between a partner and a stakeholder in my mind but many of the people and stakeholders that we interviewed and practitioners that are installing desalination systems. First of all, sometimes but often don't know necessarily why they chose for example reverse osmosis it was recommended to them, and we chose it. Because sometimes these various implementing organizations, maybe don't have that full engineering background they don't realize how valuable the data you have they have is. So for me, there is a lot of stuff where I was like you have a logbook of pressure over the last year. You have a logbook of water consumption from your plan over the why isn't this published like I that's hard data to get. So for me personally in my lab it's it's telling these stakeholders I find if they're willing to share that so that I can collect that data on my own and find ways to publish it. I also think that I guess for anyone on this call recognizing that if you have a water treatment system, a desalination system that is running in a community for more than a few months and you have data on how that's performing like get it out like we need to find to get that out there even if you're not the one that knows what to do with that data. Because we, it's very hard on the academic side to get that running a pilot from the US and India is hard like taking a lot of like two night planning trips to India, right so how do you, how do you collect that information. I think it exists and it's an issue of getting it to you so for me personally that's been talking to the right people, making sure people understand that value that data is valuable to me and why, and if they're willing to share that and acknowledging their work but that I think, I think that's a big piece of it part of those graphs is that those are all, you know those are all pilots run by academics, and we know there's desalination systems all around the world, and I have no idea how they're working, other than the ones I've seen in person right. I guess that's, I would say is we need to find a way to collect that data. Beyond me just ask questions. Wow, that's great. Thank you so I just want to acknowledge I'm going to pass it over to you, you know, so I just want to thank you again, Natasha, just always inspiring to hear what you're doing. It's great to get me to get back in there to try and try and catch up to do something equally as good. It's great to hear that the stuff that that you're doing and thank you so much for taking the time to share with us. I want to also address that your work has like, perhaps generated the most questions we've ever had so I was unable to get to everybody know these really great questions I think really sparking a dialogue and I think that's great and I think what I want to say to the people who have posted questions that we have not been able to address. We are going to have those two Natasha so just please check back when we post the recorded video, we're going to have those responses that also encourage you to reach out to Natasha, some of the people had specific things. I don't know if you're an NGO or somebody else that you know perhaps has an interesting connection or would like to just discuss with her. I know that Dr right has, you know, her her contact information is available. And, and you guys should reach out, but she will be trying will be answering all of the questions in the q amp a. And I also want to address there was a question about sort of how do we do these types of projects and coven conditions like when you can't travel to India. When you can't travel at all. You know, can I actually say one thing. Yeah, I was gonna, I was just gonna, yeah, we're developing answers. Yeah, we're developing answers to that and as a result I actually have a really cool like six continent wide study that we're going to do for the dialysis project where we're, we're working, trying to find students across the six continents that we can train and some of the methods we use to then implement. And as a sideline I might send you Yana the list of there's a few specific countries actually that particular if you're further from those countries but in general if you know anything about dialysis in your country that you're calling in from, please actually reach out because we're like in the next six months, effectively what we're trying to do we can't travel and the benefit of that is that we're training local people to do what we probably should have been doing forever. And having them running a lot of these studies so. Yeah, that's that's my plug for that is that we've essentially had to transition from doing all the work ourselves, or a lot of the work ourselves and that part of the design ethnography and, and really handing it over to people in, in other countries. Excellent segue and thank you for that practical example because this is where the engineering for change has been working actively over the last 10 years we're actually celebrating our 10 year anniversary this year to build this community this connective tissue amongst all of the practitioners and researchers that are doing this work. And I want to give a plug for next month's presenters specifically with that idea in mind Natasha, because next month we are going to be focusing on biomedical engineering and building biomedical engineering capacity. Our presenter will be Carmelo de Maria who is a assistant professor of bioengineering at the Department of. And then the idea that information is my best Italian accent I could do at the University of Pisa. And in particular he is he is also a member of the African biomedical engineering consortium criteria and has led a lot of the effort related to a platform a digital platform that he'll be sharing on on the presentation called Laura, which brings and biomedical engineering students professors from around the world together. So this call to action Natasha and this request might be excellent for that subsequent seminar and of course we will be happy to share that through our community of engineers and researchers and students as part of the work that we do and developing our fellowship so very exciting and this is a very actionable seminar. Yes, as Dr appointment mentioned we are going to be sharing those questions with Natasha and sharing the responses via our platform. If you didn't catch her email you can also email us. Webinars are engineering for change at our research and engineering for change that are will all come to us with that I know we are over time I'd like to thank you all for giving us an extra two minutes. I wish you all a good day, good evening, good morning depending where you are from. Please stay tuned for the recording and join us as you foresee members to get the invitations for future seminars directly in your inbox as well as a notification of the recording. Thank you everyone. We'll see you on the next we foresee seminar. Have a good day. Bye everyone.