UNM’s Lobo Engineering team designed and built a water-treatment system that prepares murky seawater to be purified for drinking.
The shipboard water pretreatment system set the record for the highest score in 22 years at the International Environmental Design Contest, the team said. The contest for solving technical environmental problems is hosted annually by NMSU’s Institute for Energy and the Environment (IEE).
Team member Andrew Gomez said the team competed against 15 universities at NMSU on April 4 and won first place and a prize of $2,500, which the team will split evenly among the members.
Teams in the competition chose one task from a list of six, and Gomez said his team chose the Green Reverse Osmosis Pretreatment task.
“The judges were really impressed by our design because it was something that could actually be used to pretreat water on a ship,” he said.
Gomez said the team’s design uses a filtration membrane to remove harmful particles from seawater. He said when the water exits the filtration system, it is free of particles and is ready for further processing, which is important because without pretreatment, reverse-osmosis membranes can become quickly spoiled.
Gomez said the judges focused on originality, ease of use, reliability, affordability, innovation, cost and functionality. He said the team had to design and build a system that would last at least four months and could filter 30,000 gallons of water per day without using hazardous chemicals.
“We really focused on meeting all of the criteria we had to, while making a product that people could actually buy,” he said. “That was our greatest struggle and our greatest achievement because we did exactly that.”
Team member Stephen Clark said the team entered the competition as a senior capstone design project and received funding from the Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering. He said the team only built a bench-scale model to present at the competition and to prove its functionality.
“It cost about $2,500 to build the bench-scale model,” he said. “It would cost about $40,000 to build a full-scale model and it would be marketed at $51,000.”
Gomez said their system costs considerably less than traditional seawater filtration systems.
Clark said the product is highly marketable because of its low operation cost and sustainability. He said a full-scale model could last about 24 years, well over the four-month lifespan requirement of the competition, because the system has four filtration membranes that can be rotated and reused.
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“The full-scale system would pay itself off in 2.7 years,” he said. “And it would save companies $168,000 in operating costs alone.”
At the team’s reception Wednesday, the members demonstrated the filtration process. The mixture started a blue-green color and by the end turned clear.
Team member Zachariah Harris said the group had an exact recipe to simulate seawater at the reception. He said the recipe included dechlorinated water, salt, blue-green algae powder and fertilizer.
