Juan's Individual Contribution Page
Fall 2015
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This was my first semester on AguaClara and I was placed on the ram pump subteam. My two teammates and I spent a good portion of the semester understanding the complexities of the pump. Once we had a greater understanding of the mechanism by which it functioned and the physics that governed it, we began to test the effect of springs of different lengths and constants on the efficiency of the pump. We were able to confirm the findings from the previous semester's team, chiefly that the pump would only function for a specific range of governing spring forces (the spring stiffness constant, k, multiplied by the distance that the spring was compressed.
Winter 2015-16
In January of 2016, before beginning this semester, I traveled to Honduras with 20 or so other AguaClara team members to tour AguaClara plants in Honduras and gain a more thorough understanding and appreciation for AguaClara's mission and method of operation. While there, I worked with team member Priya Aggarwal to fix existing broken ram pumps within plants, and occasionally fabricate entirely new pumps from whatever we could scavenge from local hardware stores.
Spring 2016
Continuing with the ram pump team, this semester I worked to redesign and refabricate the ram pump to make the system self-contained. Previously, the water that was required to drive the pump but that was not actually pumped (called 'unpumped water') would simply be ejected into the air. The previous design required a concrete box to be placed around the ram pump to capture the ejected water, since it was clean and treated, and therefore very valuable. After many iterations and designs, My team member and I constructed and begun to test a new, enclosed ram pump which can be placed in line with vertical pipe, in which the unpumped water simply continues its route through the pipe.
Summer 2016
I stayed on with the team this summer, working on a new, exciting project to downscale an AguaClara plant to make the technology affordable for small towns. The goal was to fabricate a 1 liter per second (LPS) plant in its entirety from raw materials: primarily PVC. Working full time with between 4-6 other students over the course of the summer, we were able to complete the entrance tank, chemical dosing unit, flocculator, and sedimentation tank. While we did not have time to construct a filter, coagulation followed by flocculation, sedimentation, and disinfection is capable of producing potable water from low turbidity sources, so the plant was shipped to Honduras at the end of the summer for testing in the field. The plant consistently produces low turbidity, chlorinated effluent and has is considered a success to the point that Agua Para el Pueblo, AguaClara's partner organization in Honduras, is setting up a shop to begin local production of these 1 LPS plants (to begin in the Summer of 2017).
Fall 2016
This was my first semester with AguaClara