Engineering students from Boston University (BU) have tested a revolutionary design intended to make water collection a monumentally easier task in arid locations around the world. The students submitted the invention for review and won first prize at the “Born Competition for Innovation in Sustainability” hosted by BU.
For this year’s competition, the candidates focused on utilizing “biomimicry,” or copying designs that are already in use by plants or animals, and applying these methods to solve human problems, according to the school.
The team decided Western Morocco would be a prime testing ground for the tower, due to both its arid conditions and its proximity to the Atlantic ocean. The design works by collecting water molecules from nearby bodies of water, eliminating the need for any desalination or purification equipment. The BU biotower is designed to be “six meters tall” and functions by “using water-repellent nylon rope to guide the condensation droplets down into a collection tank,” according to BU.
The students zeroed in on a beetle native to the Namib desert of southern Africa, which captures water molecules through hump on its back, as its primary influence in developing its “biotower” design model.
If implemented, the team stated, the biotower could significantly change the traditional practice of water gathering, which typically requires women living in these rural communities to walk for miles to known water taps. The team even proposed that the construction of these towers could provide women in these villages a sustainable, long-term objective that would also free up time that would usually be spent walking to find and gather water.
Arid regions cover approximately 30% of the earth’s total land mass, and the reality of climate change has made desertification a very serious problem for a growing amount of people, especially on the African continent.
There have already been several initiatives in Morocco to address drought and climate change effects on the country, and BU’s biotower is another opportunity to provide a sustainable lifeline to a prob
