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Student works on water purity for ravaged areasBy JUSTIN STORY, The Daily News, jstory@bgdailynews.com
Western Kentucky University mechanical engineering student Zach Pearl is at home in a lab, but his latest experiment may be the toughest yet.
Pearl, a 26-year-old senior from Bowling Green, was selected by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers to participate in an open-source design project.
Pearl and four other students from universities around the world are collaborating on the design of a prototype device, which would use a combination of human and mechanical power to purify water in areas wracked either by disaster or poverty.
The students - Pearl, William Hagen of the University of Miami, Ken Ruble of New Mexico State University, Jose La Verde of Lunds University in Sweden and Javier Lopez of Universidad Simon Bolivar in Venezuela - all received $2,000 stipends to help create their project. The group works by teleconference, meeting once a week for an hour.
Eventually, the group will meet face to face in May at WKU, which received a $30,000 grant from ASME to host the project. At that time, the group will finish construction and test its purifier, and the project will be evaluated by ASME officials.
If the final design is technically feasible, the ASME Center for Engineering and Entrepreneurship and Innovation could potentially attempt to commercialize the design.
“Something like this could possibly be used where there isn’t a safe source of drinking water,” Pearl said. “This could save lives.”
Pearl was a member of WKU’s team of mechanical engineers that created a human-powered water purifier last year, winning ASME’s District C Student Design Competition at Purdue University and placing fourth in the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Conference and Exposition in Seattle.
WKU mechanical engineering professors Kevin Schmaltz and Robert Choate are acting as project managers, offering guidance wherever necessary. Schmaltz said, however, that he hoped the student group would be capable enough to work together that he and Choate will be “pretty unnecessary.”
Pearl said the other students in his group bring high levels of enthusiasm and expertise to the project, but one of the major challenges is the current absence of face-to-face interaction.
“It’s more difficult not knowing the people you’re working with, and there is a little bit of a language barrier,” Pearl said.
At the international competition in Seattle, universities competed to design a filtration device using strictly human power; Schmaltz said that a commercially viable device would have to incorporate some sort of other energy source.
“If you were to build a large-scale water purification device entirely operated by people, you would die, because you would be regularly consuming more water than you can produce,” Schmaltz said.
The human-powered project WKU designed involved human power generated by pedaling a bicycle. For this project, however, Pearl said the group is looking into the possibility of harnessing the power of wind, among other energy sources.
Currently, the project is still in the very early stages of planning, with students doing research and computer-generated drawings of early designs. For his part, Pearl is studying the filtration process for the device the group will ultimately build.
“We have a central goal to accomplish, but we don’t know at this point what we will be dealing with in terms of size or quantity,” Pearl said.
Choate said that if the team gets stuck, they can call for help from the general public of mechanical engineering experts - the team’s ongoing work will be posted on ASME’s web site.
This is the first open-source project ASME has attempted, and provides an opportunity for mechanical engineers worldwide to help solve a critical problem.
“A project like this lends itself to being complicated, but not overly complicated that a solution can’t be arrived at,” Choate said. “So having this be an open-source project will allow the students to take a step back and think about any constraints before posing questions to the mechanical engineering community at large.
“Most of the questions could probably be translated into, ‘Help!’”
Even so, Choate said he was confident that Pearl’s knowledge and leadership skills would contribute to the group’s success.
“Zach has exhibited the technical competence to solve complex problems, and he doesn’t strike me as the type of person who likes to be told what to do,” Choate said.
— To track the progress of the project, visit www.asme.org.