Real World Project

Our Solution

Last year’s team solved the challenge by designing the Water Be-Bop. People use lawn mowers to cut their yard and have a bag that collects the grass. Farmers can dump the cut grass into the Water BE-BOP Machine. In the machine are sedimentary rocks that extract water from the grass. Using the concepts from incubators, the heated coils and fans, heat the sedimentary rocks and they release water, but obviously it’s not going to be fresh right away. So the dirty water goes through a filtration process to clean the water. When the water is done filtering you can dispense the fresh water into a bucket. Farmers are then able to use the water for drinking and/or watering their crops… This year, we decided to continue and extend their design extracting water and nutrients from leaves, stem and food compost, instead of grass. Then attaching a hydroponics wicking system for vegetation growth.

We decided to attach the Hydroponics ‘CoCo’ wicking system to the Water Be-Bop machine. Hydroponics is a form of growing plants and other vegetation without using soil. Some systems use water, wicking materials and even other aquatic animals. After visiting and consulting with specialist and farmer at Lonestar Hydroponics and Education Specialist at the Dallas Arboretum, we shared our ideas and received more information about wick systems and what would have been better to use as the wicker. Abram (specialist) later told us with the limitations we have with our setup, “COCO” would be the best wicker to use to absorb water. COCO is a wicking device that allows water to be absorbed and allows plants roots to use that to hold the chippings. The wicking device we’re using comes with a few simple problems to fix. The main problem with “COCO” is that it dries out really fast so saturation is essential. To set up our design we added two different granula types of coco chips to a plant pot and planted the propagated mint and basil along with regular sunflower seeds. We added water and nutrients.