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Entity reports on high school student Chaitanya Karamchedu who discovered a cost-effective way to create freshwater from ocean saltwater.

Roughly one in ten people in the world don’t have access to clean water, but high school senior Chaitanya (Chai) Karamchedu has plans to change that with a genius discovery.

The Portland teen has found a better way to create fresh water from ocean water.

“The best access for water is the sea … Seventy percent of the planet is covered in water and almost all of that is the ocean, but the problem is that it’s salt water,” Karamchedu told FOX News 12 in Oregon. “Scientists looked at desalination, but it’s all still inaccessible to places and it would cost too much to implement on a large scale.”

Karamchedu wanted to find a way around desalination – a process that removes minerals from saline water by breaking the molecules apart and requires a lot of energy.

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Rather than removing salt ions from ocean water Karamchedu looked at the problem from a new angle. The Portland teen knew that sea water isn’t completely saturated with salt, in fact the ocean is abundant in free-floating water molecules.

Which gave him an idea. Why go after salt water when you can go after the fresh water that’s already there? Question is: How do you find free-floating water molecules in a literal sea of salt water?

So, in Jesuit High School’s lab, Karamchedu started experimenting with a highly absorbent polymer, which he believed could act as a fresh-water-finder. How exactly? Turns out this particular polymer doesn’t bond with water molecules already bonded to salt, so anything it does bond with is free-floating water.

“People have been looking at the problem from one view point: how do we break those bonds between salt and the water? Chai came in and thought about it from a completely different angle,” said Jesuit High School Biology Teacher Dr. Lara Shamieh to FOX 12.

Entity reports on high school student Chaitanya Karamchedu who discovered a cost-effective way to create freshwater from ocean saltwater.

Chaitanya Karamchedu explains his desalination project in Jesuit High School’s science laboratory.
Via FOX 12 News

Until Karamchedu’s project, scientists have been focused on the 10 percent of water that’s bonded to salt instead of looking at the other 90 percent that was free.

Now scientists across the country have begun taking note. The U.S. Agency for International Global Development awarded him $10,000 at Intel’s International Science Fair. Likewise, he placed second place at MIT’s TechCon Conference where he also won money to continue researching.

“They were very encouraging, they could see things into it that I couldn’t,” added Karamchedu. “Because they’ve been working their whole lives on this.”

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Indeed, in the last few years MIT researchers have been working on various ways to make desalination machines  more efficient. But as Karamchedu’s biology teacher explained, these researchers were more focused on using machines that can break bonds, than looking at the free-floating water molecules.

Thanks to Karamchedu’s creativity, scientists can now approach the problem from a different perspective. This breakthrough is expected to impact millions of lives if implemented on a large scale.

For reference, in 2002 there were about 12,500 desalination plants worldwide in 120 countries, according to the United States Geological Survey. These plants produced about 14 million cubic meters per day of freshwater, which is still less than 1 percent of the total world consumption.

Since then, the number has grown to 18,426 desalination plants in 150 countries. These plants produce more than 86.8 million cubic meters per day of freshwater and over 300 million people.

But it’s still not enough and the current solutions are still not very accessible. Karamchedu’s project offers hope to change that.

“I can really see beauty in things that aren’t immediately applicable, and at the same time I want to do something to make a difference that’s not completely in the abstract. It’s important what you do has an impact on people,” he said.

Up next on the gifted teen’s agenda? He says he wants to cure cancer.

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