Chaitanya Karamchedu is from Portland, Oregon
Indian American student Chaitanya Karamchedu has found a cheap and easily accessible method to turn salt water into clean drinkable water, PTI reported.
Karamchedu, a senior at Jesuit High School in Portland, started the project as a high school science experiment in his classroom and now many technology firms expressed their interest because of its commercially viable fortune.
“One in eight people do not have access to clean water… The best access for water is the sea, so 70% of the planet is covered in water and almost all of that is the ocean, but the problem is that’s salt water,” Karamchedu told KPTV in an interview.
“Scientists looked at desalination, but it’s all still inaccessible to places and it would cost too much to implement on a large scale… The real genesis of the idea was realizing that sea water is not fully saturated with salt,” he said.
Karamchedu, who is called Chai in school, used highly absorbent polymer to filter out pure water and obtained that 90 per cent water leaving the 10 per cent that was bonded with salt.
“People were concentrated on that 10 percent of water that’s bonded to the salt in the sea and no one looked at the 90 percent that was free. Chai just looked at it and said if 10 percent is bonded and 90 percent is free, then, why are we so focused on this 10 percent, let’s ignore it and focus on the 90” PTI quoted Dr. Lara Shamieh, Jesuit High School biology teacher.
Karamchedu won a $10,000 award from the US Agency for International Global Development at Intel’s International Science Fair and also stood second with the same project at MIT’s TechCon Conference.
If implemented, millions of people would benefit from Karamchedu’s technique.