Akhmad Rivai Ardiantoro, Elgusti Haydanu and Ptiyo Purnomo are Civil Engineering students in Faculty of Engineering Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta. They won the second prize in Civil Engineering Day that was held by Universitas Atmajaya Yogyakarta on Wednesday (9/05). The team under the guidance of an FT lecturer, Darmono M.T is entitled to receive a trophy, certificate and coaching money. Rivai, one of the team members, explained that in this competition his team made a product design to turns sea water into fresh water. “We see that this kind of technology has not been exposed to people who lives by the coast, even though they find it is still very difficult to get pure water that is not contaminated with salt water, and this is exacerbated by the condition that most sea water in Indonesia is polluted with heavy metals.” he explained. "Seeing this worrying fact, we are trying to provide a solution by making a product that can purify seawater into clean water and of course this tool can not only be implemented in seawater, but also other dirty water to be purified through our product," he added.

Rivai explained that this tool consisted of several filtering processes and each filtering stage was inserted with a cotton cloth filter. "In the initial installation, it contains activated carbon, zeolite manganese, silica sand, fine sand and gravel, which function to bind iron and manganese contained in seawater," he explained. "The next stage is evaporation using an electric stove, in this system it is similar to a cascading vessel, that is, at the bottom is plain water while above sea water, in this process the steam is taken to become distilled water which is free of mercury, salt or other heavy metals." he said. In the future, we will continue to perfect this work and hopefully we can make it into a real scale because this is still a prototype, so we hope this tool can really be used by the wider community, "he said. "What is clear is that we will continue to take part in other competitions with different events and specifications in order to gain experience and challenges to constantly develop ourselves and of course lives up to the name of Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta " he concluded. (hryo)