Winners Announced in 2009 Collegiate Inventors Comp...(ork on a Ph.D. in medical engineering an...)

Undergraduate prize winners Philip Wagner, Lindsay Holiday, and Dana Leland tackled the problem of reducing arsenic found in groundwater to safe levels, with a cheap, reliable device made of materials locally available in rural Nepal. The team developed a way of using electrocoagulation -- a process employed in the large-scale water treatment plants of many modern cities -- in a system radically downsized to fit into three five-gallon buckets. Water to be treated goes into the first bucket where the students induce electrocoagulation by sending a simple electric current through two steel plates in the water. Iron precipitates are released. These iron particles bond aggressively with the arsenic that exists in the water. This newly-reacted water is then poured into a second bucket of clean sand, which has a hole in the bottom and sits over a third empty bucket. The sand collects the iron-arsenic particles and arsenic-free water collects in the bottom bucket. When the team tested the device with water contaminated with 200 parts per billion (ppb) arsenic, the output water contained under 1ppb arsenic -- well under the 10 ppb level considered safe for drinking.

Wagner, 22, grew up in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania; Holiday, 24, spent time growing up in both Teec Nos Pos, Arizona in the Navajo Nation and Phoenix; and Leland, 22, is from Baltimore. All three are Spring 2009 engineering graduates of Dartmouth College.

About the Collegiate Inventors Competition

The Collegiate Inventors Competition, a program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, encourages college students to be active in science, engineering, mathematics, technology, and creative invention. The Competition specifically recognizes and rewards the innovations, discoveries, and research by college and university students and their advisors for projects leading to inventions that may have the potential o
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