Teen Developed Water Filtration Product

A 15-year-old Bloomfield Hills student teamed with three California high school students this summer and developed a product aimed at solving the water scarcity problem in Haiti.

Their company, VivaFlow, has already drawn interest from Bill and Melinda Gates. Sanya Verma, who will be a junior next school year at the International Academy, was one of 70 students selected to attend MIT Launch, a four-week summer entrepreneurship program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge. There was a 12-percent acceptance rate for the program, she said.

Groups were partnered together based on surveys, so it wasn’t until the camp began that Verma met future business partners Kai Lin, Mihika Nadig and Tommy Yang.

“We were put into a team and we had days of brainstorming and coming up with ideas,” Verma said. “We were actually looking up about the water scarcity problem in general in a news story.

“We were talking about the process of turning saltwater into fresh water — and so I came up with the crazy idea of making a system to turn saltwater into fresh water in a water bottle.”

A team of four high school students is building a company dedicated to solving the global water scarcity problem in Haiti, incubated at MIT. (Photo: Submitted)

After consulting with professors and chemical engineers, the group learned a water bottle-sized product would be unfeasible.

“So then we scaled it up to have it be just a portable system instead of a water bottle,” Verma said.

Different formula

VivaFlow’s product, now incubated at MIT, differs from other filtration products.

“The different systems that specifically turn saltwater into fresh water are on a very large scale,” Verma said. “So they have these large products, which are thousands of dollars and they are electrodialysis or solar-powered — and they’re not very time-efficient, they’re not energy-efficient because they require an external energy source. And they’re not targeted toward underprivileged communities, specifically.”

VivaFlow doesn’t use external energy. The final product is expected to be the size of a one-gallon milk jug — small and portable — and designed to pump out a gallon of clean water every 20 minutes.

Verma and her team reached out to FEDCO, an equipment and manufacturing company that custom-made the parts, and then met with a team of chemical engineers who helped put together the system.

“We are targeting Haiti around the coastal regions,” Verma said. “We spoke to a few manufacturers in China. After talking with them, they’ve come up with a price of manufacturing it for $30. We wanted to sell it to nonprofits, specifically in Haiti, for $45.”

Read full article at: Detroit Free Press

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Taxonomy

• Water Scarcity
• Technology
• Filtration
• Desalination