Water-purifying cup makes drinkable water from creeks and streams

Read the full story from the University of Texas.

A rash of storms in Texas in recent years — from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 to the deep freeze in 2021 — has put big chunks of the population in danger and left millions without electricity or water for long periods.

These calamities also served as motivation for a researcher at The University of Texas at Austin to refocus her work on innovations that can help communities respond to severe weather events. Her latest project is a mug-sized device that can quickly clean water using a small jolt of electricity to fish out bacterial cells. In lab experiments, the device was able to remove 99.997% of E. coli bacteria from 2- to 3-ounce samples taken from Waller Creek in Austin in approximately 20 minutes, with the capacity to do more.

“We are able to clean water using very little energy because we steer the bacterial cells with electric fields, and most bacterial cells are natural swimmers who propel themselves to electrodes and got captured alive,” said D. Emma Fan, an associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, who led the research published recently in ACS Nano.