Water Warriors

Los Angeles' greed turned the
fertile Owens Valley into a dust bowl
nearly a century ago.

Copyright © Claudio Cambon

Glater is a flesh-and-blood repository of UCLA engineering history. The story of the university's role in RO membrane desalination spills out of him in vivid detail.

In the 1950s, the U.S. government and the state of California, both concerned about depleting groundwater supplies, began funding research and development into low-cost desalination. One of the beneficiaries of government funding was UCLA, where a scientist named Gerald Hassler had been experimenting with desalting methods as early as the 1940s.

Back then, the leading technology for desalting water was distillation, in which saline water is heated to produce vapor, which condenses into freshwater. But Hassler had an idea to force water through a narrow air gap between the layers of synthetic film. Hassler's scheme, which relied on reverse osmosis, never worked well, but Glater points out that it laid the groundwork for Loeb's later accomplishments.

The Kansas-born Loeb had worked in private industry for many years before coming to UCLA in 1959, at age 41, to pursue a doctorate. He joined the lab of Professor Samuel Yuster, where Sourirajan was experimenting with little success on a desalination technique that involved pressurizing saltwater against a flat piece of cellulose acetate, the same stuff used to make motion picture film stock. The problem was that little freshwater came out the other side. "It was drip, drip, drip," Glater says.

Loeb and Sourirajan then experimented with different types of membranes under different temperatures, but the results were good and bad, seemingly at random. Loeb, who was the lead researcher, could have abandoned the project but kept at it. His perseverance paid off with a breakthrough when the two graduate students finally realized that the membrane side facing the air during casting on a glass plate had to be in contact with the saline solution for the process to work.

Yuster died in 1958, and Sourirajan left UCLA in 1961 to join Canada's National Research Council, where he did important work with membranes and kidney dialysis units, which require extremely pure water. Neither was around to watch UCLA make history by producing freshwater for a thirsty town in the San Joaquin Valley.

In 1965, every kitchen sink in tiny Coalinga, southwest of Fresno, had three water faucets — one for hot, one for cold and one for drinking water. Coalinga was not yet connected to the California Aqueduct, so potable water was hauled in on railroad cars. At that time, Loeb, then working under Professor Joseph W. McCutchan '39, M.S. '50, had been experimenting with membranes cast in long, metal tubes. When the two researchers went looking for a site to field-test this new RO equipment, Coalinga was happy to oblige. The Coalinga pilot project was the world's first commercial desalination plant, and produced 10,000 gallons of crystal-clear drinking water a day. In 1972, a canal finally arrived to bring freshwater to Coalinga, and UCLA turned over the plant to the city as a supplemental source.

Patents in those days not being what they are today, no one at UCLA made much money off Loeb and Sourirajan's discovery, Glater says. In 1967, Loeb went to Beersheva, Israel, to teach RO technology under the auspices of UNESCO. Now 89 and retired from a teaching position at Ben-Gurion University, Loeb lives modestly with his wife, Mickey. One of his pet peeves is bottled "spring" water, which is the same thing as RO desalinated water but hundreds of times as costly.

RO technology has progressed beyond the system that brought relief to Coalinga, but the challenges are much the same: how to make the process affordable and environmentally safe so that it's available to everyone. For Cohen, Hoek and Glater — UCLA's determined water warriors — it's the challenge of a lifetime.

Published Jul 1, 2006 12:00 AM