Student Poster Competition Winner
First PlaceThe Guatemala Water Project:
Removal of Waterborne Viruses Using Iron-Amended Biosand Filters
Ian M. Bradley, Sheila Markazi, Peter Maraccini, Kimberly Parker, and Thanh Nguyen from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign won first place for The Guatemala Water Project: Removal of Waterborne Viruses Using Iron-Amended Biosand Filters.
The first place poster winners from each of the regional competition sites will be invited to submit their concepts for entry at the national competition held at the National Grand Challenge Summit in Los Angele in October 2010. In the spirit of promoting entrepreneurship, competitors on the national level will be asked to expand upon their posters presented at the regional meeting by preparing and presenting a marketing and business plan for their proposed technology, process, or product.
Abstract
In winter 2010, five students from the Guatemala Water Project (GWP) traveled to Socorro, Guatemala to initiate the implementation of 150 biosand filters. Through the utilization of local labor and materials, development of sustainable education and entrepreneurial programs, and close collaboration with community members, biosand filtration provides economical and sustainable water treatment for low income areas.
Although biosand filters effectively remove bacteria, protozoa, and helminthes, they only demonstrate 0.5-2 log removal of viruses, insufficient per US EPA standards. In addition to the implementation, 20 engineering students from the GWP investigate the enhanced removal of viruses by biosand filters amended with zerovalent iron.
Earlier studies show that iron oxides create positively charged surfaces to which negatively charged MS-2 virus adsorbs due to electrostatic interactions. The research utilizes both small sand column studies and full-scale concrete biosand filters to investigate the virus removing capabilities of iron-amended biosand filters.
Initial studies were performed using three glass columns with an iron/sand mixture and aquifer water seeded with MS-2 bacteriophage. After 71 days, each iron column had approximately 6-log removal, compared to 0.5-log removal by a fourth column with no iron. Additionally, experiments with full-scale filters indicate that iron-amended media improves virus removal. Current research aims at finding locally-available iron sources, such as steel wool, with high virus removal capabilities.
With over 300,000 biosand filters in use around the world, the results of this research extend beyond the community of Socorro considering that each biosand filter can be improved using iron-amended media.