UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 12 JUNE 2015
Students at Birmingham City University are celebrating after being crowned winners of a national humanitarian engineering competition for their work on combatting drought in Nepal.
Mechanical Engineering students Suhayb Manzoor, Giovanni Forioni Bragaia, Shamul Hoque and Athos Graton Roman, fought off competition from over 3,000 students from 23 UK universities to win the Engineering Without Borders (EWB) Challenge 2015.
EWB is an international development organisation that aims to remove barriers to development through engineering, supporting and encouraging engineers to develop the skills and knowledge to contribute towards sustainable community development.
Birmingham City University students wowed judges with their water harvesting system, designed to collect moisture from fog and dew in the atmosphere, which could contribute towards the provision of safe drinking water during dry seasons in areas of Nepal.
Student Suhayb Manzoor, said: "We designed a bamboo structure with a hydrophobic mesh net that the fog would travel through and the dew would collect on. Condensed water would then gather and collect in a tank.
"We built apparatus and tested our ideas at labs here at the University, replicating weather conditions in Nepal as close as possible.
"We made sure the apparatus was much more cost-affordable compared to some of those that already exist on the market. The height and width of the product we designed and created can also be easily changed, meaning there aren’t restrictions on where the harvesting system can be located."
As part of their prize, the students will head to Mexico in July to contribute ideas to further research on how concepts of humanitarian engineering can impact on poverty alleviation.