wcm.01.2025.61.67

This study presents the development and evaluation of a portable multi-filter water filtration device tailored for low-income regions, aiming to design a cost-effective solution to address water quality challenges by removing contaminants and ensuring safe drinking water access, with key components such as filter housing, caps, bracket, lithium-ion battery, water pump, and switch integrated using Autodesk Inventor, a methodology involving systematic filter selection and experimental testing with municipal tap water and river water samples, showing significant reductions in metals, particulates, and impurities, despite limitations in microscopic analysis, with future efforts focusing on advanced imaging equipment and broader field trials to refine the device and meet specific community needs, contributing to the advancement of portable and affordable water filtration solutions for underserved populations.

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Water, an essential yet often taken-for-granted resource, is the backbone of life on Earth and fundamental to human activity, covering about 71% of the Earth’s surface and playing a crucial role in domestic use, manufacturing, and agriculture, yet despite its abundance, access to clean, potable water remains a critical global challenge due to scarcity, pollution, and the impacts of climate change, contributing to a complex crisis that underscores the urgent need for sustainable water management and conservation efforts to ensure equitable access, as access to safe drinking water is a fundamental human right and a critical determinant of public health (WHO and UNICEF, 2021), though millions of people globally, particularly in low-income regions, lack this basic necessity (SDG, 2020), with contaminated water sources contributing significantly to the spread of waterborne diseases, causing immense health burdens and hindering development (Prüss‐Ustün et al., 2014), making the development of portable and efficient water purification devices specifically designed for low-resource settings a promising solution to address this global challenge (Clasen et al., 2007), with such devices needing to be affordable, easy to operate, and capable of removing a broad spectrum of contaminants from various water sources (Yang et al., 2020), as over half a billion people in rural areas of low-income countries lack access to clean drinking water due to dispersed housing, inadequate infrastructure, sporadic public water supply, and the high cost of purification technologies, forcing many to consume untreated water and exposing them to harmful contaminants such as pathogens, trace organic compounds, and heavy metals like copper, zinc, chromium, and arsenic (Mahlangu et al., 2023), where water filters are essential tools to combat these risks by effectively removing pollutants such as bacteria, viruses, and toxic metals, safeguarding against health-threatening impurities often invisible to the naked eye and stemming from sources like agricultural runoff and industrial waste, ensuring the consumption of safe, clean water, with portable multi-filter water purification devices being compact and efficient solutions for ensuring clean drinking water through multiple filtration stages to remove impurities, often including components like filter elements, activated carbon layers, and sterilizing pieces to enhance water quality (Yeongsu et al., 2019; Haoming et al., 2019; Jiang, 2019), designed for ease of use and transportation, making them suitable for various settings, including remote areas and emergency situations (Xiaoguang et al., 2018), by incorporating innovative features like compressible cylinders, filter membranes, and vacuumized negative-pressure environments to quickly purify water from turbid to clear liquid, meeting drinking water standards (Xiaoguang et al., 2018), and a variety of portable water purification devices have been developed to address water contamination issues in low-income regions by incorporating different filtration methods to remove impurities such as pathogens, heavy metals, and volatile organic compounds (Xaba et al., 2022), including designs with activated carbon and ceramic candle filtration, UV irradiation, and multi-stage filtration systems (Singh et al., 2022; Yusuf et al., 2020), using materials like stainless steel, clay, and activated carbon for their effectiveness in water purification (Yusuf and Murtala, 2020), with devices designed to be portable, modular, low-cost, and power-efficient, suitable for use in underdeveloped areas, as performance evaluations have shown successful removal of contaminants, improvement in water quality, and compliance with international standards for safe drinking water, offering promising prospects for providing clean and safe drinking water to communities in need, and in a study on household water treatment systems, various commercial cartridge filters were assessed for turbidity removal (Afkhami et al., 2021), with testing revealing that pleated filters could be effectively cleaned and reused unlike spun and wound filters, and pleated filters in series could filter up to 6m³ of turbid water and be regenerated for three filtration cycles, highlighting their efficiency and durability, with a household water purification system developed utilizing cartridge filtration, UVC disinfection, and chlorination to treat turbid raw water (Maciel et al., 2021), showing substantial reductions in turbidity, Escherichia coli, and total coliforms through a multi-phase approach involving various filtration steps and manual chlorination, effectively enhancing water quality for domestic use in rural communities, with the development of advanced multifunctional portable water purifiers using composite membranes and laccase immobilization showing efficient removal rates of micropollutants, microorganisms, and turbidity in less than five minutes (Taheran et al., 2019), as research findings reveal the effectiveness of electrospun nanofibers in eliminating water bacteria and viruses, offering a promising avenue for water purification solutions (HMTShirazi et al., 2022; Fahimirad et al., 2021), and with demonstrated high removal efficiency for both contaminants, the application of electrospun nanofibers in water treatment emerges as a practical approach for enhancing purification systems, and in response to the critical need for safe drinking water in low-income regions, this study introduces the development and evaluation of a portable multi-filter water purification device by addressing design considerations, filtration stages, and material selection to elucidate the methodology behind the device’s creation and performance assessment, presenting an innovative solution that seeks to contribute to the provision of clean water solutions for underserved communities, thereby advancing global public health initiatives, with this study providing a comprehensive overview of the design process and experimental procedures employed, offering insights into filter selection, design considerations, and performance evaluation methodologies.

2. Experimental Design of Water Treatment Device
2.1 Filter Design
The detailed design of the filter device using Autodesk Inventor software examines each component’s functionality and contribution to efficient water filtration, ensuring optimization for performance, durability, and ease of assembly through visualization and analysis.