Students on brink of clean-water solution

A group of high school students has developed an efficient way to produce a decontaminant in hopes of helping countries that lack sufficient clean water.

Students from Laguna Beach High teacher Steve Sogo’s class in advanced chemical research provided an update on their solar-water purification project Thursday night to a room full of parents and school board members in the school library.

The team began meeting last summer with a goal of supplying clean water to the people of Oloolaimutia village in the Masai Mara reserve in Kenya, an area many students had became familiar with through the Model United Nations program.

Laguna Beach seniors Aviva Meyers, Andrew Couse, Nolan Gunsolley, Grant Barton and Charlotte Andrews, along with Laguna Hills High junior Jeremy Sogo, received a $9,918 grant last fall from the Lemelson-MIT Program, which celebrates outstanding inventors, to help develop the project.

The program looks for projects that use science, technology, engineering and mathematics, known in academia as STEM, to help others and solve problems.

Students knew they could combine hydrogen peroxide with ultraviolet light to kill bacteria-infested water, but they needed to develop a cost-effective means of producing hydrogen peroxide.

Enter a catalyst — anthraquinone — and ethanol. Anthraquinone is a naturally occurring compound activated by light. Ethanol is a renewable, domestically produced alcohol fuel made from plant material such as corn, sugar cane or grass.

Students, who said they spend five to 10 hours a week on the project, learned they could bind anthraquinone to beads of silica and place the beads in ethanol, all inside a clear plastic box to take advantage of sunlight.

To test the theory, the group placed curved plastic bottles containing ethanol and anthraquinone on top of the school’s roof for several hours.

The curved shape is important because it focuses light to maximize intensity. The method will be replicated in Kenya.

As for the process, ultraviolet rays break off oxygen atoms from the anthraquinone and instigate the breakdown of ethanol. Loose molecules of hydrogen and oxygen eventually combine to produce hydrogen peroxide, while the anthraquinone returns to its original state.

The goal is to produce 0.4 grams of hydrogen peroxide each day, enough to disinfect 40 liters of water.

“The great thing about this process is that no anthraquinone is wasted,” Andrews wrote in an email. “It is completely regenerative. We can use it for years.”

Students have been using E.coli as the test bacteria, feeding it a diet of luria broth, a nutrient-rich liquid containing vitamins and minerals to grow the colonies. Once the number of bacteria reach a certain level, the group freezes samples to stunt further growth.

One parent at Thursday’s presentation asked Barton if the group had actual water samples from Kenya to be certain that the bacteria that students were trying to kill were similar to the kind found in the African nation.

Barton, 18, said they had not.

“If we can kill E.coli, it’s likely we can kill almost everything else,” Barton said. “A small amount [of hydrogen peroxide] goes a long way.”

Students will continue testing to gauge the best way to produce hydrogen peroxide and determine how much is needed to kill bacteria to make safe drinking water.

Andrews noted the contributions of seniors Bryson Elghanayan and Halle Redfearn, along with several juniors who are helping with research and ready to take the reins from the graduating seniors should the project not be finished by June.

Laguna is one of 15 teams scheduled to showcase their projects at EurekaFest, the Lemelson-MIT program’s public, multiday celebration of the inventive spirit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on June 19 and 20.

“We’ve definitely made great strides,” Andrews said. “Bryson’s group has clear data that our parabolic reflector [a clear, curved surface] is effective. There is so much that needs to happen between now and June. It’s nerve-wracking whether we have enough material to be certain we can pull together a full machine.

“We need to test more to be confident we can put it in the village.”