Cool, clear and refreshing—water is renowned as a source of life. But if water is contaminated by pathogens and other harmful pollutants it can be a source of disease and death. This fact is not lost on Ron Mathis, CEO of Just Water, whose company has been producing emergency water filters for humanitarian purposes since 1999.
“We’ve been literally all over the world—our filters are in 71 countries,” said Mathis. “We love helping people get clean water.”
Just Water sends out filters at cost for disaster purposes. Recently, Mathis developed a new water filter attachment that removes radiation.
“Some parts of this world have natural radiation in aquifers, but normally radiation is in areas where they mine uranium,” Mathis explained.
Engineering an opportunity
Collin College alumnus Christopher Anway volunteers with Texas Baptist Men to assemble Just Water’s life-saving filters for disaster relief. Each radiation filter has to be flat for a tight fit to prevent radiation from escaping. Anway was working in a room full of volunteers sitting on the floor using rubber mallets to flatten hundreds of filters.
“When Christopher saw what we were doing to produce our radiation filter attachment, he said, ‘I think we can do better.’ He brought the project to the Collin College robotics club, and they designed a device that presses our product pieces together,” Mathis explained.
According to robotics club president Andrew Midkiff, the company had thousands of filters that needed to be flattened. A dozen students designed and built “Filter Press,” a stainless-steel pneumatic press.
“Some of the volunteers’ fingers were bleeding, and production time was through the roof,” said Midkiff, who helped build skyscrapers in downtown Dallas as a commercial electrician and is planning to transfer to the University of Houston to earn an electrical engineering degree. “We can adjust the PSI on the new device and flatten five filters at a time. Volunteers used Filter Press for six days and pressed more than 4,000 filters.”
“The air powered piston is operated by a single pedal valve,” explained Derek Sommer, robotics club secretary, who is planning to earn a master’s degree in neuroscience and work on research in behavior and brain science at The University of Texas at Dallas. “You hook it up to an in-house air pressure system,” he said.
A design borne of Occam’s razor
Students worked together to create the perfect design, voting on each decision as they progressed. One design had spring-loaded, telescoping pieces.
“You push down, and it would gradually flatten because if it did it too fast the screen would kink or buckle. The filters can’t tear because people would get sick,” Midkiff said.
According to Sommer, in the end simplicity won the day, a reflection of the famous philosophical premise.
“We made a fully operational version of the telescoping device, but you would have to keep it lubricated and dust could get in,” Sommer said. “It was an elegant design, but at the end of the day it didn’t work as easily as a flat piece of metal—a demonstration of Occam’s razor.”
Club members settled on a small number of parts and a steel frame for durability because they knew the device would be used in mass production.
“Safety was a big priority because the parts drive a ton of force,” Midkiff said. “The tool guarantees the operator’s hands can’t be in the machine when you operate the machine effectively.”
Home of invention
Robotics club members requested funding and received $750 from the college’s Student Activity Fee Allocation Committee to pay for safety gear, tools and supplies to build Filter Press. Midkiff is quick to point out that students in this club are not required to know anything about robotics.
“Robotics club is a fun place to think critically on multidisciplinary processes without a grade,” Midkiff said. “This club is for people who want to be challenged. You can be at ground zero, where you learn basic thinking skills, all the way up to advanced engineering skills. Our only requirement is being a Collin student and being ready to think.”
Midkiff says he chose Collin College because the professors put extra effort into their curriculum.
“Collin College just makes sense. You receive the same quality of education but at an affordable cost compared to larger, expensive universities. At Collin, you can mold your experience anyway you want it to be.”
Sommer agrees but shares that he came to Collin College to find answers.
“I had questions, but chemistry and math were in the way,” said Sommer who earned a professional writing degree at Baylor University. “I am interested in pharmacological, behavioral and machine learning because I think teaching the machine how to understand the human mind is the way of the future. I wanted to be able to talk to my professors, and at Collin, the class sizes are smaller, especially biology and organic chemistry. At a university you would be with 250 people and a teaching assistant. I love math now in a way I never would have imagined. It has been a wonderful metamorphosis,” said Sommer, who will soon be working as a math tutor at the college.
Pressing on
Currently, robotics club students are working on a more complex project for Just Water, automating the company’s filter-making process.
The new machine features coding and is called “Filter Vend” because according to Sommer it functions like a vending machine and is a multiscale, manufacturing device. The students hope to get the new device to their client in the next couple of months because they know that another disaster could be right around the corner and their device could make a difference. Mathis couldn’t agree more.
“Any time someone says we can do this smarter it cuts down on time and expense, and that savings gets passed on to the customer,” Mathis said. “These students made a believer out of me. Potentially, they will be helping hundreds of thousands of people, and they are not doing it for profit. Isn’t that cool?”
For more information about Just Water, visit www.Justwater.me. For more information about Collin College, visit www.collin.edu.
Reprinted with permission of Allen Image