The Next Generation Of Water Filters
Team Name:
Saving Bikini Bottom
Team Members:
Jose Loera, Oscar Alexandri, Nicole Mendez, and Bridgette Bran
School:
High Tech High Chula Vista
The Issue
Water pollution has been a global issue affecting our daily lives each day. Millions of waste items ranging from plastic bottles to car tires have been going into our oceans daily. Here in San Diego a popular break known as the “North Garbage” has been affected by the Point Loma Water Treatment plant that spews around 180 million of gallons of partially treated sewage.⁴ All this waste is negatively affecting our rivers, oceans, and lakes by invading them with plastic, cans, tires, cigarette butts, etc.⁶ We are polluting these bodies of water, which not only do we and animals drink from, but provide us with a way to clean, cook, and survive.
Our solution to this issue is constructing a cheap and efficient water filter for people who need one in order to obtain safe, clean drinking water. This water filter will be easy to construct, portable, and made of easily obtainable materials. Our filter will be able to help millions of people without access to clean water in our world and also help with the depollution in our oceans, rivers, lakes, etc. If we construct our filter with cheap and easily accessible materials the results of the filtered water will prove that the water is safe to drink.
The Plan
Our goal is to build a cheap, portable, and functional water filter that can produce good quality water with low-cost materials that are can be easily found.
The materials we decided on are:
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4-inch wide PVC pipe*
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1 jar of activated carbon*
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1 bag of Sand
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Rocks (Pebble-sized)
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Coffee filters
The pipe will be used as a container and the coffee filters will be taped to the bottom to hold everything together. The sand, charcoal, and rocks will be put inside the pipe in layers to purify the water poured into the top of the pipe.
We will test the quality of water before and after being filtered based on its ph level, turbidity, alkalinity, and nitrate level and see the differences between the two to see if the filter improved or worsened the state of the water being tested. We will test samples of personally manufactured dirt-water and water from Heritage Lake.
Analyzing Our Data
After 4 weeks of constructing and gathering data from the cheap and accessible water filter we designed, we were able to examine the results of the water before and after being filtered. The first source of water we examined was from Heritage Lake. Our second source of water we examined was dirt water. We manage to filter these 2 sources of dirty water to compare and contrast our results we gathered with the Pro-Lab Water Testing Kits we bought. Our results we got from both sources were mostly supportive of our hypothesis.
First we tested our samples of dirty water we were able to observe that the outcome is mainly clean. Before filtering out dirt water it contained high levels of alkalinity. Everything else was at a safe level after filtering. The smell was still the same there was no change in it, it smelled like dirt. In the end it did not contained as high a concentration of minerals as before.*
Our second test was with our second source of the Heritage Lake water, which came out less cleaner than what we except. Before filtering the lake water, it had cloudy yellowish/brownish color. It had very high amount of alkalinity, and also large amount of minerals (hardness). It had very displeasing smell, like sewage. After filtering the lake water the alkalinity drop down to low and the minerals down to high. It had a greenish/grayish cloudy color. It still had a bad sewage smell and had bits of fecal matter inside the water. Overall it was not safe to drink.
Our Conclusion
From the results we received from the different types of tests we conducted, we were quite pleased by seeing some of our results. With the information we received we concluded that our filter works wonderfully with dirt water. Even visually you were able to tell the difference between the water before and after being filtered. Our results from the water testing kits we used also provided evidence that the water seemed safe enough to drink.
Results from the lake water ending up a little displeasing to what we originally thought what was going to happen. Our filter did not do a very good on removing the fecal matter from the water. It also left a very bad odor to the water which you can clearly indicated that it wasn’t very safe at all. It still had a very large amount of PH and minerals in the water. At first glance you could see there wasn’t much of a difference made before and after filtering in the turbidity of the water.
Our group was very satisfied to discover that our water filter was able to efficiently filter certain types of polluted water, but there were certain kinds of water that proved our filter ineffective. We believe that one of the reasons as to why our water filter did not work was 1) because of the materials we used 2) our budget, in essence, was not a budget at all but the collective money of the four sole members of our group, and lastly 3) we began this project about two months before the date of submission and taking out of account the amount of time spent writing this application we only had five weeks to pick a topic, find a solution, collect information based on our own experiments, and come to a conclusion. With a better budget and a longer amount of time to plan, fabricate prototypes, and spread word of our plan we think we could found better working materials and construct a better professional model.
Global Impact
Around the beginning of our project we came across the fact while researching that 3.4 million people around the world lack access to clean safe drinking water, and apart from that they have to struggle with little to no access at all. Our goal for our water filter was for it to be portable, cheap, and easy to replicate. With our own water filter implemented and used in areas across the globe that do not have access to safe potable water. Several people would benefit from our water filter by having finally obtained a low-cost, but effective way to filter their polluted water and help protect and maintain the health of their families as well as their own.
By purifying the polluted water that people use for daily needs our water filter would essentially help maintain if not increase the amount of pure and palatable drinking water that there is in the world. And if the filter were to be properly used it would even lessen the risk of obtaining serious or even fatal diseases from the water we collectively drink by eliminating harmful bacteria. Furthermore it would lessen the demand for bottled water, reducing the amount of plastic made and the pollution caused by the factories in charge of bottling water. And our main goal, the filter would remove the risk of receiving the 2,100 toxins known to be in our water currently.
Pictures
