The Use of Gravity to Power a UV Light Purification System
School Name
Spring Valley High school
Grade Level
11th Grade
Presentation Topic
Engineering
Presentation Type
Non-Mentored
Abstract
1,000,000 people die each year due to a lack of clean water (Water.org). As technology advances, novel and more efficient ways of creating more clean water should be pursued. One universally available, easily accessible, and heavily underused energy source is gravity. The goal of this research was to determine if gravity could provide sufficient energy to sterilize water by remodeling Shell’s GravityLight. It was believed that the resulting device would be able to produce 200 milliliters of sterilized water in 7 minutes. The device was created by repurposing the GravityLight to power a UVC-LED. A stock of E. coli contaminated water was created to test and water sterility was measured using the membrane filtration method. It was found that around 25.1333% of the bacteria were killed off by the prototype. A t-test of the data was performed with an alpha value of 0.05. There was no significant difference between the number of colony forming units before and after sterilization, p= 0.76 In conclusion, the current state of the prototype is ineffective and further improvements and testing need to be done on this method of sterilization.
Recommended Citation
Ho, Jacob, "The Use of Gravity to Power a UV Light Purification System" (2019). South Carolina Junior Academy of Science. 287.
https://scholarexchange.furman.edu/scjas/2019/all/287
Location
Founders Hall 222 B
Start Date
3-30-2019 11:45 AM
Presentation Format
Oral and Written
Group Project
No
The Use of Gravity to Power a UV Light Purification System
Founders Hall 222 B
1,000,000 people die each year due to a lack of clean water (Water.org). As technology advances, novel and more efficient ways of creating more clean water should be pursued. One universally available, easily accessible, and heavily underused energy source is gravity. The goal of this research was to determine if gravity could provide sufficient energy to sterilize water by remodeling Shell’s GravityLight. It was believed that the resulting device would be able to produce 200 milliliters of sterilized water in 7 minutes. The device was created by repurposing the GravityLight to power a UVC-LED. A stock of E. coli contaminated water was created to test and water sterility was measured using the membrane filtration method. It was found that around 25.1333% of the bacteria were killed off by the prototype. A t-test of the data was performed with an alpha value of 0.05. There was no significant difference between the number of colony forming units before and after sterilization, p= 0.76 In conclusion, the current state of the prototype is ineffective and further improvements and testing need to be done on this method of sterilization.
