When Mohammed Rasool Qtaishat was growing up in Jordan, he often had to go days without water. The government would shut it off due to shortages, forcing citizens to store it beforehand or go thirsty.
"Sometimes you'd wake up in the morning and not have water to take a shower," Qtaishat said. "I suffered with my family because of the water scarcity problem."
The water shortage is a global crisis. The United Nations has warned that if the current trends in climate, population growth, urban migration and consumption continue, two-thirds of the world's population will face a lack of water by 2025.
One solution is desalinization: extracting salt from seawater so it's clean to drink. However, salt particles are very small so the process is slow and uses vast amounts of energy. The water must go through several filtering steps, including reverse osmosis where it passes through a polymer membrane.
But Qtaishat, who earned his chemical engineering doctorate at the University of Ottawa, said he developed new membrane technology that is more efficient than current methods. He said the key to his technology is the material of his composite membrane and a design that allows it to run on solar energy. Qtaishat filed a U.S. patent for his design in December 2008.
His design won him the top prize of $10,000 at the Ottawa Venture Tech Challenge in 2008, and his research proposal has already attracted some financial support, including $286,000 in funding from the Middle East Desalination Research Center.
Now Qtaishat is back in Jordan, where he experienced the water crisis firsthand, and is working to develop a model that could be used in the industry.
Farmers have relied on seasonal laborers, unpredictable weather and back-breaking work for centuries. But technologies adapted to farmers’ needs could ease their burdens and increase the productivity of their crops.
Information and mobility technologies will help farmers increase yield and reduce labor, said Sanjiv Singh, research professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Singh is leading a project to adapt these technologies for apple growers in Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon. Small family farms will benefit from the research.
“They can’t keep up with the technology as much and they don’t have large investing power," he said. "So I think this is the kind of thing that could make a big difference."
Precision farming — information technologies including GPS, sensors, yield monitoring, Geographical Information Systems and variable rate technology — allows farmers to gather accurate crop data and use it to improve their yield. The technology can detect disease, soil moisture and the number of moths in an acre of apple trees, among other things.
“It doesn’t tell you what the stress is due to," Singh said, "but it at least tells you something’s going on that shouldn’t be going on.”
Mobility technologies, he added, will also impact the farming world. The research team has been working on vehicles that can move through orchards autonomously or semi-autonomously. They could perform tasks including spraying, mowing and transporting fruit.
In the near future, manipulation technologies including automated arms or other types of manipulators could precisely pick fruit.
These technologies will help farmers raise their profits by increasing yield and reducing labor costs. They will also do more of the back-breaking work and allow laborers to farm at the technical level.
