Protect Your Body, Filter Your Water!
Students make sense of the problem with drinking water contamination due to various pharmaceuticals and hormones. They experience the steps of the engineering design process as they design solutions for a real-world problem that negatively affects the environment. Substances such as pesticides, prescription medication, and hormones are detected in the drinking water supplies of American and European metropolitan cities. Using chlorine as a proxy for estrogen and other drugs found in water, student groups design and test prototype devices that remove the contamination as efficiently and effectively as possible. They use plastic tubing and assorted materials such as activated carbon, cotton balls, felt and cloth to create filters with the capability to regulate water flow to optimize the cleaning effect. They use water quality test strips to assess their success and redesign for improvement. They conclude by writing comprehensive summary design reports while reflecting on how engineers can design solutions to help detect and effectively remove these contaminants from our drinking water.
It's a modern-day engineering challenge to remove pharmaceuticals from drinking water.Copyright 2022 Rachel Diamond, TeachEngineering
The water that comes from our faucets has passed through a complex system designed by many different types of engineers. Civil, chemical, electrical, environmental, geotechnical, hydraulic, structural and architectural engineers all play roles in the design, development and implementation of municipalities' drinking water supplies and delivery systems. Hydraulic engineers design systems that safely filter the water at a rate needed to supply a specific region and population. Chemical engineers precisely determine the amounts and types of chemicals added to source water for coagulation and decontamination to make the water safe to drink and not taste bad. Even so, modern pharmaceutical and agricultural practices persist in contaminating our water supplies. In this activity, students play the role of engineers challenged to design-build-test filtration devices to regulate flow and maximize output and decontamination.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Discover a water quality-related problem and design possible solutions to solve the problem.
- Make sense of how pharmaceuticals and hormones have resulted in pervasive water contamination.
- Describe the effects humans have on the quality of water on Earth.
- Follow the steps of the engineering design process while designing and building prototype devices to filter contaminants from a liquid solution.
- Design a system that regulates flow rate to maximize effectiveness of water treatment.
- Filter out 75% of the chlorine from a provided chlorine solution "water pollutant"..