A remote village in Tonga needs clean drinking water but there is limited electricity to run a processing plant. That’s the real-life challenge facing a group of University of Canterbury (UC) final-year Chemical and Process Engineering (CAPE) students for their team design project. 

The team of four needs to create an economically viable plan for a small-scale plant to desalinate and sterilise drinking water. It should be powered by renewable resources since the village – Felemea – only has electricity for two hours each day and diesel is expensive.

The idea for the project came from Siale Faitotonu, a geomechanics laboratory technician in the UC College of Engineering. He was a high school teacher in Tonga, and visited Felemea on a UC research trip at the start of this year. Faitotonu has been providing first-hand knowledge of the village to the students and giving them advice on local contacts and traditions. 

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