Team:ECUST/Applied Design
What’s the problem
According to the US Department of Energy, there are more than 100,000 cooling towers in the United States. The problems of cooling efficiency caused by pollution led to billions of dollars loss without including cleaning costs. And the cost of a cooling cycle system due to corrosion and water pollution was from 50,000 to 100,000 US dollars.
Status quo
Rust and biofilm would form when bacteria gather in pipeline causing serious blockage of pipeline. Adding chemicals, including rust removers, fungicides and corrosion inhibitors, is one of the most common methods for enterprises to solve this problem in circulating water. However, these chemicals are often highly corrosive and oxidative which will do great harm to our environment.
Design
Our project is based on Synthetic biology method aiming to eliminate iron rust in cooling water system. We put our engineered bacteria into system identifying the biofilm of Thiobacillus ferrooxidans which grows in the rust. We don’t need to worry how much bacteria we should add into the system and control various parameters during the process. Besides of high sensitivity and efficiency, our method could save a large amount of cost and let us get rid of traditional chemical reagents.
Our vision
Our project is based on Synthetic biology method aiming to eliminate iron rust in cooling water system. We put our engineered bacteria into system identifying the biofilm of Thiobacillus ferrooxidans which grows in the rust. We don’t need to worry how much bacteria we should add into the system and control various parameters during the process. Besides of high sensitivity and efficiency, our method could save a large amount of cost and let us get rid of traditional chemical reagents.
Validation
Former experiments have proven wonderful ability of our bacteria to remove iron rust and they feature high specificity as well. Considering subsequent pollution caused by bacteria, we equip them with suicide switch system controlled by light to keep them from diffusing to the environment which has been proven to be available through our professor’s research. Our design was supported by many companies and they were willing to adopt our idea in real system.
Future vision
We plan to introduce our product into solving various practical issues. In our field research, some companies would like to cooperate with us with great passion. If this kind of engineered bacteria is able to achieve great elimination of iron rust in real circumstance, we could develop similar design to remove other pollutants. We hope we could cooperate with more enterprises and our design could be taken by companies into more practical considerations.