Faculty Advisor
Dr. Jose Alfaro (Assistant Professor, School of Natural Resources)
Faculty Co-advisor
Dr. Steven Wright (Professor, School of Engineering)
Team Members
Whitney Johnson (MS, School of Natural Resources, team point of contact); Sibu Kuruvilla (Ph.D., School of Engineering, 2nd point of contact); Rashmi Krishnan (MS, School of Natural Resources); Zu Dienle Tan (MS, School of Natural Resources); Nicholas Jansen (BA, College of Literature, Science and the Arts, Program in the Environment)
Partner organizations
Sustainability Without Borders, Rural Intercultural Student Exchange (RISE, Beijing)
Project Summary
High levels of arsenic in the groundwater in China are a major public health concern. In addition to a fairly widespread volume of naturally occurring arsenic-contaminated well-water across China, a significant amount of arsenic is contributed by anthropogenic actions like rapid industrialization, weak environmental policies and poor planning. Cases of chronic arsenicosis have been found in eight provinces in mainland China, including Shanxi. Biosand Filters (BSF) are low-cost, low maintenance, point-of-use filters that are built out of locally available materials. The Arsenic Biosand Filter (ABSF) is a version of the BSF that is designed to remove arsenic and pathogens present in the groundwater. At the University of Michigan, we built a prototype of an ABSF design with the intent of replicating the contamination and filtration scenario in Shanxi, testing our filter and further optimizing our design. At Pingyao - Shanxi, we worked with our student partner organization, the Rural Inter-cultural Student Exchange (RISE) group from Tsinghua University and a student group from the Taiyuan University of Technology to implement another design variant of the ABSF in a village. We successfully built 43 ABSFs in individual households, and initial performance tests showed that the ABSFs were able to remove up to 87% of arsenic, relative to the arsenic content of the inflowing water, while minimizing the turbidity of the water. Ongoing and future work entails the periodic testing of the filters’ performance to ensure arsenic removal is stable and continuously available. Further, we are interested in creating a dynamic flow setup to reduce labor intensity of using the ABSF and further automate the system. Additionally, we are currently researching the extent of arsenic contamination in other communities to explore regions we can expand our work to.