Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 4 No. 4 Winter 2019 | Page 21

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From left: Doctoral
student Xiaofan
Li, undergraduate
students Erin Jones
and Yixing Zhu,
doctoral student and
team captain, Jia Mi,
and academic advisor
Professor Lei Zuo and
postdoc, Qiaofeng Li
Graduate student receives $25,000 from EPA
Twenty-one teams are taking part in the
16th Annual Environmental Protection
Agency’s People, Prosperity and the Planet
(P3) design competition. Recently the agency
awarded $25,000 to mechanical engineering
graduate student Jia Mi to work on Virginia
Tech’s entry.
The two-phase competition offers opportu-
nities for student teams to design solutions for
a sustainable future. The first phase awards
up to $25,000 to test, research, and develop
designs that promote development and serve
as proof-of-concept. Phase II award grants can
provide up to $100,000 to continue develop-
ment and demonstration of the design. The
phase-1 project will be shown in the 2020
National Student Design Expo (NDSE) in June
at National Harbor, Maryland.
“We do a lot of research on ocean wave
energy harvesting in the Center for Energy
Harvesting Materials and Systems (CEHMS),
mostly targeting large-scale wave energy har-
vesting,” Mi said. “The P3 competition wants
small-scale systems to provide safe and sus-
tainable water resources. I thought we could
use some of the technology we’re looking at
in our larger-scale work for this project. Our
goal is to demonstrate a functional prototype
with a 65L/day desalination capacity.”
Mi’s team includes a postdoctoral associate, a
doctoral student and two undergraduates who
will leverage the mechanical motion rectifier
(MMR) designed by faculty advisor Lei Zuo,
professor of mechanical engineering and
John R. Jones III Faculty Fellow, to operate
a portable desalination system powered by
hybrid renewable energy that will use both
solar and wave energy along with a membrane
to produce drinking water from saline water.
“The system includes three floating buoys
about one-square meter in size,” Mi explained.
“The solar panels attached on the buoy surface
will heat water, while the buoy system with
MMR-based pump will capture wave energy
to pump water through the membrane where
salts are removed and the drinkable water is
stored in a holding tank.”
The entire desalination process takes place
inside the buoys with the intent that some-
one in a boat can acquire fresh water from a
storage tank easily each day.
Funding from the P3 competition was
announced in September and Mi’s team is
currently engaged in the dynamic modeling
and design stage of the competition.
“We’ll have a model by March that we can
test in a wave tank,” Mi said.
If the team makes it through to stage two of
the competition, Mi said they would then look
at the possibility of open ocean testing.