Chaitanya Karamchedu

Los Angeles : An Indian American student Chaitanya Karamchedu has found a new method to convert salt water into fresh water.

The senior at Jesuit High School Senior in Portland, has managed to do all this from his classroom.

Karamchedu feels that 1 in 8 people don’t have access to clean water but will get access after using his high school lab experiment.

Speaking to media, he said, “It’s a crying issue that needs to be addressed. The best access for water is the sea, so 70% of the planet is covered in water and almost all of that is the ocean, but the problem is that’s salt water. Scientists looked at desalination, but it’s all still inaccessible to places and it would cost too much to implement on a large scale.”

This idea will certainly help creating effective ways for those who have been unable to get drinking water but will get help from the ocean in a manner that has been a tough topic for scientists for years now.

But Karamchedu thinks he may have figured it out by experimenting with a highly absorbent polymer.

According to him, “The real genesis of the idea was realising that sea water is not fully saturated with salt. It’s not bonding with water molecules, it’s bonding to the salt.

His teacher, Dr Lara Shamieh, says, “People were concentrated on that 10 percent of water that’s bonded to the salt in the sea and no one looked at the 90 percent that was free. Chai just looked at it and said if 10 percent is bonded and 90 percent is free, then why are we so focused on this 10 percent, let’s ignore it and focus on the 90.”

US Agency for International Global Development at Intel’s International Science Fair has already awarded $10,000 for his work.

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