Sterilizing Drinking Water Using Sunlight: A Design Challenge

The Boehm Lab focuses much of its research on issues dealing with fresh and saltwater contamination and water quality. My mentor, PhD Candidate Jill McClary, is conducting investigations to better understand UV photoinactivation of enteric and pathogenic bacteria in wastewater and recreational waters. Using methodologies from the lab experiments we are conducting in the this summer, students in my biotechnology elective class students will design an experimental protocol and apparatus to disinfect drinking water using solar radiation. The project will be framed as a design challenge, and the user for our design product will be a person living somewhere without access to clean (in this case, free of pathogens) drinking water. Students will get working knowledge about how bacteria may photoinactivate with exposure to the sun outside of our class by conducting a simple photoinactivation experiment together as a class, before they create their design. As part of this process, students will need to: engineer a solar apparatus; create a water sampling protocol; use a standard procedure to isolate bacteria in the water from the samples they took from their apparatus; use a standard procedure to grow the bacteria in their samples; and use a standard procedure to count the bacteria in their samples.