#59: Expedition ARCHIE: Water resilience for Arctic installations

About this episode

This episode discusses the development and demonstration of a portable water treatment system for Arctic conditions, featuring insights from Dr. Clint Smith of ERDC.

Water is critical to life and essential for Warfighter operations. However, accessing it in frigid Arctic conditions can be a challenge. To meet this need, a portable water treatment system developed by ERDC was successfully demonstrated at the U.S. Department of War’s northernmost installation. The Deployable Resilient Installation water Purification and treatment System (DRIPS) supplied potable water at Pituffik Space Base in Greenland. The test occurred during Expedition ARCHIE (the Arctic Resource Conservation Hydration Innovation Experiment), an international collaboration between ERDC, the U.S. Space Force and the Danish Defence Estate Agency. Joining us to discuss how DRIPS can improve water supply in the Arctic is Dr. Clint Smith, a senior research biologist at ERDC’s Geospatial Research Laboratory. Topics include the challenge of water resilience in the Arctic (1:28), the capabilities of the DRIPS system (9:12) and how it performed at Expedition ARCHIE (15:59). We also talk about ERDC’s participation in an international collaboration for Polar research (4:26), how DRIPS benefits from ERDC’s multidisciplinary expertise (20:47) and how the team is working with industry to…

People in this episode

Guest: Dr. Clint Smith

Topics covered

• water resilience
• Arctic installations
• portable water treatment
• international collaboration
• military operations
• environmental science

Keywords

• water treatment
• Arctic
• DRIPS
• Expedition ARCHIE
• potable water
• ERDC
• military technology
• collaboration
• research

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), U.S. Space Force, Danish Defence Estate Agency

Places: Pituffik Space Base, Greenland

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