Two teams of UNM engineering students won an international competition this month by designing efficient and cost-effective water treatment processes.
The teams estimated that they spent more than 100 hours since November working on their projects for the Waste Environment Research Consortium Environmental Design Competition.
"I was very impressed and am very proud of (the students)," said Tim Ward, professor and chairman of Chemical Engineering. "I knew they had a chance this year to win because I was watching the quality of what they were doing, and . I knew they had a good product and they worked hard on their posters and their presentations and they covered all the loose ends, so I was really happy to see them get the final prize."
The students were challenged to design solutions for real-world problems while developing operational bench-scale models that they presented to panels of environmental professionals. They competed against 31 teams from 21 universities in the U.S. and Canada.
The first team consisted of students Norma Wells, Shelly Kartin, Nelle Rivera and Toi Carden. By using membrane nanofiltration, they placed first in their task category by designing a sulfate-removal process of ground water from mining wastewater.
The objective of this team was to develop a cost-effective process that could replace conventional water-treatment methods to make the sulfate levels meet federal standards.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Wells said the chance to work on a big project that wasn't part of class curriculum proved gratifying.
"It was good to have a concept and an idea, do the research and look at different methods, then take it all the way through to a full-scale economic write-up, look at if it would be a profitable thing and do all of those steps that you wouldn't normally do in class," Wells said.
Wells' teammate Rivera said she's proud her team's devotion resulted in winning.
"Our hard work paid off. It's brought on a lot of fame, I guess you could say, within the University.. It's kind of like walking around with a badge of honor," Rivera said. "Not to mention it was a rewarding experience to finally pay off all the work we have been doing since winter break on top of all the hours of homework from other classes, and work that we have and the life that we live outside of school."
The team that placed second in the competition included four seniors.
At the outset of their work, Cynthia Douthit, Jonathan Paiz, Anne Hellebust and Marta Cooperstein had to take into account the fact that an increasing population limits water resources.
The team's design is a pretreatment system to treat brackish or slightly salty water for reverse osmosis and electodialysis reversal. The pretreatment system lowers the cost per gallon of water while increasing the efficiency of the two technologies.
Douthit, who will take a job with Intel after she graduates in May, said the competition provided her with useful experience.
"In undergraduate classes, it's hard for us to get hands-on experience very often. I mean, the labs do facilitate that, but this was a project that was more realistic of what we would experience in the real world," Douthit said. "We were given a very open-ended problem, and we had to build a solution, test it and prove that it works. So it was actual good, real-world experience that we got."
