IIT-M student designs system to recycle urine

Indian Institute of Technology or IIT is one of the highly popular educational institutes in India. A student Anusha Ganta belonging to the IIT Madras is sensational now. This 2nd year PhD student of civil engineering department and 3 project staffs, mentors Indumati Nambi and Divyapriya a post doctoral fellow have retrofitted urinals on the IIT Madras campus to collect urine. It must be taken into account that this urine collected is then processed into many useful materials for use in manufacturing. Sensational isn’t it!!

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Anusha Ganta specializing in the environmental engineering of IIT M, has come up with this method to recycle urine and has caught the attention of many now.

Information collected is project ‘Water Chakra’ has won the Indian Innovation Growth Programme 2.0 award in the month of July. It is important to mention that the collected urine is stored for 3 days so that urea gets converted to ammonia.

In the next step, steam distillation technique is used and ammonia is segregated. It is brought out that this commercial grade liquid could be use to make cleaning products like detergents or in the manufacture of rubber. Then, to precipitate phosphorus through struvite process, magnesium is added to the rest of the liquid. It was pointed out by Ms Anusha Ganta that 90% of water could be recovered by electrochemical process and the water could be utilized for gardening and flushing purposes etc. Presently, 150 to 200 gms of phosphorus is got from 50 litres of urine. She added that a prototype for Carbon Zero Challenge was developed by her and her team of members and with that they had applied for India Innovation Growth Programme 2.0. Ms. Anusha Ganta finally threw light on how the prize money of Rs 10 lakhs would be used to register it as a start-up and a compacted version of the prototype would be developed.