Civil Engineering students of Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta’s Faculty of Engineering won second place in the Civil Engineering Day event held by Atmajaya University, Yogyakarta, Wednesday (9/05). The team, which consists of Akhmad Rivai Ardiantoro, Elgusti Haydanu, and Priyo Purnomo under the guidance of Darmono M.T., is entitled to receive trophies, certificates and coaching money.

Rivai, one of the group members, explained that in this competition his team made a product design for installing seawater into fresh water. "We see that this kind of technology has not been exposed, even though people on the coast are still very difficult to get pure water that is not contaminated with sea water. Moreover, the fact shows that most of the seawater in Indonesia is polluted with heavy metals," said Rivai. "Seeing this worrying fact, we are trying to provide a solution by making a product that can purify sea water into clean water. Of course, this tool can not only be implemented in seawater, but also other dirty water to be purified through our product," he added..

This tool consists of several filtering processes and each filtering stage is 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. The next stage is evaporation using an electric stove. This system is similar to a cascading vessel in that at the bottom is plain water while above it is sea water. In this process steam is taken to become distilled water which is free from mercury, salt, or other heavy metals.

In the future this work will continue to be refined and will be made on a real scale based on the initial prototype, so that this tool can really be used by the wider community. "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 make the name of the institution proud," said Rivai concluding his explanation. (hryo/aw)