A 20-year-old engineering student from a Chihuahua farming family has won one of Mexico’s top innovation prizes for an irrigation filter that is already helping more than 500 farmers use scarce water better, Mexico News Daily reports.
Luis Ángel Robles Morales, who studies mechatronics at Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Chihuahua campus, designed the OAKs Filtration system to stop sand and silt clogging drip and sprinkler systems. Its filtering area is two to three times that of standard units and it cleans itself as water flows. In tests it ran for eight hours without losing pressure, and it costs a fraction of conventional filters.
Chihuahua has endured a severe drought this year, so every drop counts. The Eugenio Garza Sada Award for student social innovation brings a prize of one million pesos, and Robles plans to put half of it back into the project.
Source: Mexico News Daily