Students design system to recycle kitchen sink water

The students of GITAM, (Deemed-to-be-University), have designed a smart water-recycling system for kitchen sinks that will help ease water shortages that have become an annual feature for several Indian cities.

Based on the unique innovation, the GITAM students have been selected as one of the five teams at the AIM-ICDK Water Innovation Challenge 2.0, organised by the Atal Innovation Mission, NITI Aayog, in partnership with Innovation Center Denmark (ICDK), under the aegis of the Denmark Technical University. The winners will represent India at the International Water Congress to be held in Denmark in May 2022.

Five students from the team are pursuing a B Tech course including Anik Panja, Prithvi Tripathy, Sai Sasikanth Rokkam Jeswin GN and Shivani Narsina. The sixth student, Rushali Mishra, is enrolled in second-year B.Sc (Environmental Science). The team was mentored by GITAM VDC (Venture Development Centre) Coaches Vikas Kumar Srivastav and Bollem Raja Kumar. The team has also received support from the leadership team of GITAM at different stages to convert their idea from a mere concept to a functional one.

The students relate to the excruciating plight of Chennai's water crisis in 2019 and are determined to give a shot at a solution. They designed an eco-friendly and smart grey-water filtration system called Hydro Gravitricity, which is capable of catalysing biogas. It recycles the dark grey water coming out of kitchen sinks after dishwashing.

The team's coach Vikas Kumar Srivastav said, "Faced with Chennai's water crisis of 2019, the students decided to throw the kitchen sink at the problem. As part of the core technical team in the IEEE student branch of GITAM, they were required to make a group project innovatively related to water conservation. Coincidentally, the water crisis in Chennai was at its peak at that time, with extreme shortage of water for daily use. That became the key catalysing event for the team to embark on the project of recycling water draining out of kitchen sinks after dishwashing. It took the students 2.5 years to take the concept to the prototype stage through multiple designs and iterations."

Sai Sasikanth Rokkam, a member of the student team, said, "The Hydro Gravitricity solution is readily implementable in a real-world setting. As the system can be retrofitted to existing pipelines, it can be easily scaled up from domestic household to industrial level. We will work on developing the solution further with mentoring by Atal Innovation Mission incubators and the Denmark Technical University. We intend to apply for relevant grants from Niti Aayog to design a medium-scale prototype and bring the product to the market."