IIT Hyderabad Researchers Build Cheap Water Filter Using Algae

Besides clean air, another major challenge that India is facing is a clean water supply. In the country, there are many areas that don’t have access to clean drinking water. Moreover, not many people can afford expensive water purification devices.

To deal with this problem, researchers from IIT Hyderabad have come up with a solution.

The research team consists of Associate Professor Dr. Debraj Bhattacharyya from IIT Hyderabad’s Department of Civil Engineering and research students Keerthi Katam, Anjana Babu, Aishwarya Pandey, Martin Gundupalli, Vinod Vadithya, and Raj Kumar Oruganti. All of these students are also from the school’s Department of Civil Engineering.

What they are working on is a water purification system that uses algae to help lower treatment cost for wastewater as well as providing easy methods to produce recyclable water and biodiesel. The targets of their product are people from rural areas.

For the product’s initial stages, the researchers want to install their treatment in urban communities that already recycle sewage water using in-house facilities for water treatment.

In his statement to BW Education, Dr. Bhattacharya said that in India, the total wastewater from Class I cities as well as Class II towns have reached over 75 billion liters a day. That’s why it is necessary to have a decentralized wastewater treatment.

According to an IIT Hyderabad’s press release, at the moment, water treatment facilities can only deal with 26 billion liters of water per day.

As these facilities aren’t capable of treating all the wastewater, the untreated water is released into land and water bodies, leading to disastrous contamination and pollution.

The team worked on how to breakdown wastewater’s organic waste by studying green micro-algae as well as diatoms. This not only breaks down waste but also improves the water quality for reusing and recycling.

The team is in the process of putting the system into a test at a Hyderabad gated community. At the moment, Bhattacharya is also working with some Japanese universities in the field of wastewater treatment.