College of Environmental Design Associate Professor of Architecture and architect Paz Gutierrez is a woman on a mission: In addition to her role as a mentor to students at CED, she is also putting her design skill to work in the science realm, addressing a key environmental and socioeconomic issue around the world -- water scarcity.
Together with environmental engineer Slav Hermanowicz and bioengineer Luke Lee, she hopes to take the recycling of wastewater from sinks, baths and laundry, known as greywater, to a whole new level. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the multidisciplinary team is engineering solar panel technology that makes greywater reusable while creating thermal energy in the process. What is now wastewater would be used at least twice, cutting demand, and the free solar energy can be captured as well. The greywater isn't clean enough to drink, but it's fine for flushing toilets or washing clothes. The team published its work late last fall in a paper titled, “Solar Optics-Based Active Panel for Solar Energy Storage and Disinfection of Greywater” in the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Journal.
"This is the future of sustainable building systems--synergistic optimization processes that are win-win from the local to the global scales," explained Professor Gutierrez. "The end user benefits because they're using less water and paying less for electricity or gas; the community benefits because it has less water to treat; the environment benefits because we're not going to be contaminating aquifers. That's the fundamental difference between this design and other building systems."
Professor Gutierrez says this technology could be ready for commercialization within the decade at a price point that would be practical for use in water-stressed areas. You can read the paper in full here, and watch a video on the team’s solar-optic panel here.