It’s estimated that around 800 million people lack access to clean drinking water around the world, with some 2.5 billion living in unsanitary conditions.  When joined together, these two factors are believed to be responsible for 90 percent of diarrheal deaths.

A recent study proposes an answer to the problem that has its roots in crowdsourced computing.  The project utilizes minute vibrations of carbon nanotubes, otherwise known as phonons.  This method is believed to greatly improve the diffusion of water through sanitation filters.

“We’ve discovered that very small vibrations help materials, whether wet or dry, slide more smoothly past each other,” the researchers say. “Through phonon oscillations—vibrations of water-carrying nanotubes—water transport can be enhanced, and sanitation and desalination improved. Water filtration systems require a lot of energy due to friction at the nano-level. With these oscillations, however, we witnessed three times the efficiency of water transport, and, of course, a great deal of energy saved.”

The study found that, under the right conditions, these vibrations can increase the effectiveness of water diffusion by around 300 percent.  The authors believe this has some major implications for processes such as desalination and water conservation.

How the solution was crowdsourced

Interestingly, the project was initiated on IBM’s World Community Grid, which is a crowdsourced computing platform whereby over 150,000 volunteers donate their spare processing power to worthwhile projects.

“Our project won the privilege of using IBM’s world community grid, an open platform of users from all around the world, to run our program and obtain precise results,” the authors say. “This was the first project of this kind in Israel, and we could never have managed with just four students in the lab. We would have required the equivalent of nearly 40,000 years of processing power on a single computer. Instead we had the benefit of some 150,000 computing volunteers from all around the world, who downloaded and ran the project on their laptops and desktop computers.”

The research team are firm advocates of such distributed computing, and the benefits it can bring to scientific domains that increasingly rely on heavy duty computing to deliver results and insights.

“Crowdsourced computing is playing an increasingly major role in scientific breakthroughs,” they say. “As our research shows, the range of questions that can benefit from public participation is growing all the time.”

The research team are hoping to commercialize their findings and are currently speaking with a number of corporate partners to try and help bring it to market.