Kota Kinabalu: A seawater desalination device aimed at benefiting sea nomads like Sabah's Bajau Laut community has won three Malaysian university students the honour to represent the nation at the James Dyson Award, an international competition for design and engineering students to come out with inventive solutions to real-world problems.
Bennie Beh Hue May, Loo Xin Yang and Yap Chun Yoon are second-year students pursuing a Bachelor of Product Design at Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation's School of Media, Arts, and Design (Somad) in Kuala Lumpur.
They beat 120 other entries to walk away with a RM10,000 cash prize and the ticket to the international stage where they will square off against 27 other national winners from around the world.
Their entry is called the "WaterPod", a sustainable, floating, triangular and cost-effective water desalination pod that uses solar power to convert seawater into potable drinking water.
"According to Unicef and WHO, one in three people globally still do not have access to safe drinking water, including the sea nomads," said the team on their product page as reported by Mashable SE Asia.
"They usually need to travel far just to purchase sufficient drinking water from time to time. However, 97 percent of the Earth's water is found in the oceans, and that makes desalination as a highly potential method to retrieve drinkable water."
"But today, desalination is an expensive yet environmentally costly process done by desalination plants," they added. "Thus, WaterPod emphasises sustainability in terms of material usage via a low-cost, yet environmentally-friendly desalination method to generate drinkable water for them."
If the trio win the final competition in October, they will walk away with a cash prize of RM160,000 and an additional sum of RM27,000 for their university.
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