Deepika Kurup: A young scientist's quest for clean water

Deepika Kurup  (born 1998) is an inventor, scientist, and clean water advocate. She is the recipient of the 2012 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Award. Kurup was awarded the $25,000 Award for her work in developing a new and inexpensive method to clean water using solar power.  She also won the 2014, U.S. Stockholm Junior Water Prize with her project "A Novel Photocatalytic Pervious Composite for Degrading Organics and Inactivating Bacteria in Wastewater." The award included a cash prize of $10,000 and an all-expense paid trip to Stockholm, Sweden, where she competed at the International Stockholm Junior Water Prize. 

Background

Deepika Kurup was born in Nashua, New Hampshire. She has given a number of accounts of what inspired her to work on water purification. In her entry video to the competition, she explains the mechanism used for developing her invention and also explains some of the factors that led to the invention.

Water purification method

Kurup's initial idea that won her the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist in 2012 is based on using a photocatalytic compound for water purification. This project involved a photocatalytic composite made up of titanium dioxide and zinc oxide, hollow glass microspheres, and Portland cement. In 2012 Kurup's photocatalytic composite was able to reduce the amount of total coliform from 8000 colony-forming units to 50. In addition, it oxidised Methylene blue at a faster rate than standard solar disinfection methods.

She improved her method and after 3 years developed a pervious photocatalytic composite using sand, TiO2, Portland cement and silver nitrate.This photocatalytic pervious composite showed 98% reduction in total coliform bacteria immediately after filtration. Exposure of the filtered water to sunlight with a photocatalytic composite disc resulted in 100% inactivation of total coliform bacteria in just 15 minutes. This project won her the 2014 United States Stockholm Junior Water Prize

She also is the National Geographic winner in the 2015 Google Science Fair.

Attached link

Taxonomy

• Photocatalysis
• Photochemical