Hi! This post is about my science project which I and JianZi would be presenting next year. Readers, if you have any comments, questions or views, please voice out, so that we can improve on it. If there are any places where you don't fully understand, you can ask about it too, so that we will be able to deal with the questions from people.
Basically our project is a simple but special water filter system. What's extraordinary about it is that the components are made out of natural and organic materials. Furthermore, unlike other commercial water filter, our filter can also absorb heavy metal ions which might bring harm towards the health of us consumers. After an test on tap water obtained from many areas in Penang, we found out that heavy metal ions can be found in majority of them. The eco-filter consists of 3 different compartments, the Basic Filtration Compartment, the Organic Biosorbents Compartment, and the Final Purification Compartment.
The Basic Filter compartment – Consists of fine
sand, coarse sand and stone gravels, layered from top to bottom. This
compartment functions to remove the large-sized impurities, bacteria and
insoluble substances. When water flows through it, the suspended solids
precipitate in the sand layers as residue and the water, which is reduced in suspended
solids flow out of the compartment. However, heavy metal ions are still present
in the water.
The Organic Biosorbents compartment – Consists of
neem leaves (Azadirachta indica) powder, egg shells powder and risk husk
powder. This compartment functions to remove the heavy metal ions present in
the water. The ions adsorbed include Pb2+, Cd2+ and Cr3+
ions. Although this eliminates heavy metal ions from the water, but this
process added color and odor to it.
The Final Purification Compartment – Consists of volcanic rocks, activated carbon and wood based carbon. The activated carbon removes color from
the water, thus resulting in clear and pure drinking water, while the volcanic rocks and wood-based carbon remove bad odor from the water. After going through all
stages of the filter, the initially contaminated water is channeled to a
storage tank and stored for domestic use, drinking, or other uses.
Besides adsorbing heavy metal ions, the organic biosorbents (especially neem), has many other functions and uses. Neem tree originated from India, and was called the 'Tree of 40 Uses' because of its wide use in the medical field. As we all can see, all the organic biosorbents we used are edible and biodegradable. Actually many other biosorbents can be used, and we wanted to include them into our water filter, but because of our time constraint, we had to go with 3 biosorbents only. The preparation of these bio-materials also take up a long time and extremely energy consuming, because we need to dry them upcompletely, and ground them into complete powder using only a pestle and mortar.
So that a brief introduction for our project. Give us feed backs! Thank you all for taking your time to read about this!
