Solar Desalination and Hydrogen Electrolysis System
A low-cost floating device that produces fresh water and renewable hydrogen from salt water
Solo researcher: designed, built, and tested the full system, including CAD modeling and 3D printing the custom electrolysis chamber
An optimized 3D-printed electrolysis chamber cut hydrogen production time from 51.66 hours to 356.51 minutes per liter, earning a Bronze Medal at Genius Olympiad International 2023.
Objective
The optimized system produced roughly 1 L of hydrogen in 356.51 minutes, an 8.7x improvement over the 51.66 hours the first configuration needed, and the project earned a Bronze Medal at Genius Olympiad International 2023. Over 40 percent of the global population lacks reliable access to clean water, and desalination plants are expensive and energy intensive. My goal was to design, build, and test a low-cost floating device that handles two jobs at once: desalinating salt water into drinkable condensate and running electrolysis to generate hydrogen gas as a storable renewable fuel. This was independent solo research, so every design decision, build, and trial was mine.
Approach
The prototype used a clear umbrella frame covered in film as the condensation surface, with solar panels on a central mast, thermal insulation, and wiring running to submerged electrodes. Testing happened in a 300-gallon pool mixed to a 3.5% salt solution, with a 1000 W grow light on a 12-hour cycle standing in for sunlight. Desalination trials measured condensate collected over day and night cycles; when the first umbrella orientation gathered water in the wrong spot, I reversed it and collected significantly more. Electrolysis was the bigger problem. The initial setup took 51.66 hours to fill a 1 L container with hydrogen, so I CAD modeled a custom electrolysis chamber in Tinkercad and FDM 3D printed it: a central tube holding eight coiled-copper electrodes, fed by four solar panels, with a threaded port for a collection bottle. Iterative testing across five experiment series drove each revision.
Outcome
The redesigned chamber brought hydrogen production down to 356.51 minutes per liter, an 8.7x gain over the original wiring and electrode layout. I presented the work at Genius Olympiad International 2023 (Project ID 3042), where it received a Bronze Medal, and again at the STANYS New York State Science Congress in June 2023. The project convinced me that careful geometry and electrode design matter as much as raw power input, a lesson I’ve carried into every build since.
Concept → Reality