CHARLES Sturt University lecturer Dr Miao Li has been praised for her forward-thinking plan to bring clean water to the world.
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Dr Li, who teaches civil engineering, was CSU’s representative at the ‘5RP’ Five-Minute Research Pitch Program, which gave academic staff in the early years of their research the chance to pitch a recent research project.
But there was a catch – they had just five minutes and three information slides to get their ideas across.
Dr Li came third in the Science and Health group for her pitch.
Her research mission was to use a simple, practical, feasible and affordable strategy to bring clean water to the world.
To contextualise her research problem, Dr Li explained that, across the world, 663 million people suffer from lack of access to safe water.
Alarmingly, 1.5 million children die from water poverty and waterborne diseases across the world each year.
“The problem we are trying to solve is to bring clean water, the most fundamental human right, to our brothers and sisters on this land,” she said.
“This is the number six goal of the United Nations development goals.
“As a researcher and an engineer, I feel the obligation and I have the passion to contribute to save the lives of 1.5 million children and improve the quality of lives of 663 million people.”
Dr Li explained that water resources are becoming so limited that wastewater treatment plants to recycle wastewater are becoming common, however the technology is both expensive and very demanding to use.
“For rural and remote areas, people have to resort to water stabilisation ponds, simply because ponds use nothing but the natural sunlight to kill germs in wastewater,” she said.
Ponds are normally structured with baffles, which create channels to direct the water flow so that the water stays in the pond long enough to receive adequate treatment.
The question arose on how to design a pond with baffles to achieve maximum treatment efficiency.
To answer this research question, Dr Li and her research team collected water samples at the pond inlet, outlet, at various locations, and different depths within the pond.
Using other tools, the team found a way to build a pond with optimal baffle design to achieve the maximum treatment efficiency.
“In fact, our research data showed that, applying the information derived from this model, a deadly pathogen, E.coli, can be removed by up to 99.99 per cent,” Dr Li said.
Dr Li and her team will do further testing and modelling to refine the research.
