Open-Source Design Team Named

Peter Easton
ASME News

On the heels of the 2007 ASME Student Design Competition held at the Congress in November, the Society has named a five-person team to work on an open-source project.

At the 2007 Congress, students from 13 universities designed and built pedal-powered devices designed to purify water by heating it to the boiling point, and then condense the steam generated to get potable water.

The team's objective is to provide potable water in the developing world and to disaster areas. The group will collaborate on a virtual design for several months and then build a prototype at Western Kentucky University, the host school, in June.

The team consists of Bill Hagen, University of Miami; José La Verde, Lunds University in Skane, Sweden; Javier Lopez, Simón Bolívar University in Caracas; Zach Pearl, Western Kentucky University; and Ken Ruble, New Mexico State University.

Kevin Schmaltz and Robert Choate, both associate professors in the department of engineering at Western Kentucky, are the project managers.

According to David Soukup, managing director of ASME Centers, which is overseeing the program, the team's work will be made available on the Society's Web site, www.asme.org, by late January. He also said that the team welcomes ideas for its design from all interested individuals. Suggestions can be e-mailed to Schmaltz or Choate at kevin.schmaltz@wku.edu or robert.choate@wku.edu, respectively.

The 2007 Student Design Competition challenged teams to design a portable, human-powered device to provide potable water in the absence of electrical power. The University of Nevada, Reno, won the event.

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