Students’ Solar-Powered water-testing tool wins $40,000

University of Washington engineering students have won an international contest for their design to monitor water disinfection using the sun’s rays. The students will share a $40,000 prize from the Rockefeller Foundation and are now working with nonprofits to turn their concept into a reality.

Team member Jacqueline Linnes, who recently completed her bioengineering doctorate, traveled to Bolivia last year with the UW chapter of Engineers Without Borders. While there, she and other students treated their drinking water by leaving it in plastic bottles in the sun.

The concept is an old one. Solar disinfection of water in plastic bottles, also called SODIS, is promoted by many nonprofits. It offers a cheap and easy way to reduce some of the roughly 1.5 million diarrhea-related children’s deaths each year. But global adoption has been slow, partly because it is hard to know when the water is safe to drink.

Students’ water-testing tool wins $40,000, launches nonprofit — University of Washington