Problems regarding heavy metal pollution in food fisheries commodities have often been encountered, especially in fish and crustaceans such as shrimp and shellfish.

This issue correlates with the development of the industrial era 4.0, where many anthropogenic and industrial activities dump waste in the surrounding waters, thus impacting environmental sustainability.

This can be a serious problem because the levels of heavy metals in fish if consumed, exceed the quality standard levels, which can cause various serious problems such as cancer, sensory diseases, paralysis, and many deaths.

Based on this problem, the collaboration of three students from the Faculty of Engineering (FT), Faculty of Agricultural Technology (FTP), and Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Sciences (FPIK), created a heavy metal decontamination technology based on a pulsed electric field integrated with Arduino and electrocoagulation or called as PuriFish as an effort to degrade heavy metals in fishery commodities.

The five students are Naufal Adi Ar-Rafi (FTP) as chairperson, Aditya Bayu Pratama (FT), Zahra Cahya Ramadhani (FTP), Brilliant Praditya (FTP), and Dani Habib Farikhin (FPIK) supervised by Joko Prasetyo, STP., M. Si.

PuriFish is an innovative heavy metal decontamination technology based on a pulsed electric field that is integrated with Arduino, and is equipped with electrocoagulation.

“The pulsed electric field process provides high voltage and opens quite large pores in fish and crustaceans, causing heavy metals to come out of the sample and mix with the water. Then, the electrocoagulation process will bind heavy metals and precipitate them in water, making it easy to filtrate,” said Naufal Adi.

Naufal added that in the next stage, the water will be discharged through a tap containing a carbon nanotube filter with high adsorption efficiency so that the waste water does not pollute the environment.

The use of PuriFish has the potential to be further developed on a fishery product processing industrial scale as an effort to realize a Golden Indonesia 2045 and food product safety.

“Once again, thank you to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology (KEMENDIKBUDRISTEK) and also Universitas Brawijaya for always supporting us to realize our innovations in the 2023 Student Creativity Program in the field of Creative Initiatives (PKM-KC),” Naufal concluded.