According to the information presented in MIT News, the device is roughly the size of a briefcase and requires less power to operate than a smartphone charger. It can also be powered by a small, portable, solar panel, and at a simple push of a button could transform water from any sea, lake or ocean into drinking water that even exceeds the World Health Organization quality standards.

Unlike other portable desalination units that require water to pass through filters, the device developed by the MIT team of researchers utilizes electrical power to remove particles from drinking water, thus eliminating the need for replacement filters and making the maintenance process a lot easier.

“This is really the culmination of a 10-year journey that I and my group have been on. We worked for years on the physics behind individual desalination processes, but pushing all those advances into a box, building a system, and demonstrating it in the ocean, that was a really meaningful and rewarding experience for me,” says senior author Jongyoon Han, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of biological engineering, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), cited by MIT News.

According to him, the desalination units available for sale at present typically require high-pressure pumps to push water through filters, which are very difficult to miniaturize.

The device developed by the MIT team of scientists elies on a technique called ion concentration polarization (ICP). Instead of using filters to clean the water, the ICP process applies an electrical field to membranes placed above and below a channel of water. The membranes repel positively or negatively charged particles — including salt molecules, bacteria, and viruses — as they flow past. The charged particles are funneled into a second stream of water that is eventually discharged.

But since the ICP does not always remove all the salts floating in the middle of the channel. So the researchers incorporated a second process, known as electrodialysis, to remove remaining salt ions.

The MIT prototype can generate 0.3 liters per hour of drinking water and it requires only 20 watts of power per liter.