Students Win $75,000 EPA Grant for Water Project

4/22/2011

Student team has won a $75,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to take their design for a sustainable water filtration system to the next level.

Written by

Team members Jacob Becraft and Emily Van Dam at the National Sustainable Design Expo.

A student team advised by CEE Professor Charlie Werth has won a $75,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take their design for a sustainable water filtration system to the next level. The award was given at the National Sustainable Design Expo, April 16-17 in Washington, D.C., part of the EPA’s 2011 Earth Day celebration, in the People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) award competition.

The group poses in front of their poster at the Expo.
The group poses in front of their poster at the Expo.
The student team at the Expo (left to right): Eden Steege, Jacob Becraft, Alex Llewellyn (back), Yana Genchanok (front), Marika Nell, Emily Van Dam, and Kimberly Parker.

The team is working on the “Oglala Lakota Water Project,” for which it is designing a water filtration device that uses bone char as a filtration material to remove arsenic and uranium from groundwater at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The students are collaborating with Oglala Lakota College. The group is led by Alex Llewellyn, a senior in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, with CEE senior Kim Parker as co-leader. Thirteen other undergraduates from several disciplines complete the group.

Illinois students first began working on the project in the summer of 2009, when Oglala Lakota College requested assistance from the University of Illinois-based WaterCAMPWS, the Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems. Two trips to the reservation that year confirmed the presence of arsenic and uranium in the reservation’s drinking water, Llewellyn said.

“Bone char, which is bone that is crushed and cooked at high temperatures, was determined to be a sustainable option for the community, as it effectively removes arsenic and uranium and is readily available,” he said.

The group studied the effects of charring on the kinetics of arsenic and uranium uptake, and designed a preliminary point-of-use filter device for use under the kitchen sink, he said. In the next year, they will standardize a filter design for implementation at the reservation in a sustainable and environmentally friendly manner. They are coordinating with the Kola Foundation, a not-for-profit organization of Illinois MBA students that aims to improve the lives of the Pine Ridge Reservation residents, to look at the feasibility of developing a business in the area.

Six student teams in all won awards for the design of sustainable technology, including a second University of Illinois team advised by Brian Lilly, a lecturer in the Technology Entrepreneur Center.  That team designed a solar powered water collection, containment, and self-regulating distribution system. The grants are intended to help the teams further develop their designs, implement them in the field, and move them to the marketplace.  A third Illinois team, advised by CEE Professor Benito Mariñas, won an honorable mention for their project, "Sustainable Agriculture for the Water Catchment Protection Area in Ntisaw, Cameroon."  The competition included 55 teams from universities across the nation.


Share this story

This story was published April 22, 2011.