Our challenges for the Summer Fall of 2012 are designed to make it easier for new communities to adopt the AguaClara technologies. Our goals are to reduce costs, improve fabrications techniques, extend our designs to lower flow rates, improve our documentation, and create an AguaClara business to facilitate spread of the technologies.
We During the fall semester we will be preparing to take a whole series of technologies to full scale deployment. We will be transferring these technologies to Agua Para el Pueblo over the coming months or during our annual January engineering in context trip to Honduras. The technologies that we are preparing to deploy include low flow unit processes for flocculation, sedimentation, and stacked rapid sand filtration. Foam filtration will soon be ready for testing in very small communities or as emergency water source. The ram pump also will be ready for testing in one of the AguaClara plants in January of 2013.
We will be developing our new theory of flocculation and we will be testing new designs for hydraulic flocculators pushing the technology to an even smaller scale with a goal of meeting the needs for communities all the way down to 100 people. That will require developing new fabrication techniques for both flocculation and filtration (filter in a pipe).
We are exploring options for developing an AguaClara business to separate the implementation side from the R&D effort. AguaClara Inc. will provide engineering services to implementation partners who in turn provide support services to community owned AguaClara water treatment plants. Of course, the goal is to keep communication between implementation and R&D all levels of the AguaClara organization so that we can continue to improve the technologies based on feedback from the field.
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