Miguel Miranda 
University of New Hampshire
Major: Environmental Engineering
Mentor: Dr. Vinka Craver, URI Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Water Quality Testing and Treatment
There are about 326 million cubic miles of water, approximately one percent of that is suitable for human consumption. According to the World Health Organization, only 60% of the world has access to adequate drinking water leaving an unfortunate 40% without clean water. There are several reasons for the phenomena; the first is accessibility and the second is cost. This study focuses on providing a solution by creating an affordable and potent home base filtration system with a ceramic filter pot embedded with silver nanoparticles. So far, studies have been conducted on the ceramic pots ability to remove tributary. Studies have also been conducted on silver element’s antibacterial properties. The current study consists of putting these two factors together to create a powerful, yet simple filtration system. What we have done, is to combine the previous studies to determine the effectiveness of the ceramic pot versus the silver impregnated ceramic pots. More specifically, the study consisted of figuring out how much silver was sufficient for the ceramic pot to complete its function. The study also measured the silver nanoparticles antibacterial properties’ effectiveness when compared to normal silvers antibacterial properties in different types of water systems. After further testing and data collection we intend to complete the simple yet effective filtration system in hopes of reducing the unfortunate 40% to less than 10%.
