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Every day, diarrhoeal diseases from easily preventable causes claim the lives of approximately 5000 young children throughout the world. Sufficient and better quality drinking water and basic sanitation can cut this toll dramatically (UNICEF). Distributing untreated surface waters as drinking water is one of the causes of waterborne disease. Point of Use and municipal scale treatment schemes are two potential solutions. In recent years, centralized large-scale water treatment and supply systems have been seen as an unsustainable expensive strategy to provide safe drinking water in low-income countries. Often, conventional technologies developed for use in the first world have been inserted in third world settings, which lack ready access to supply chains, trained technicians, and sufficient capital. These systems so frequently fail.
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The AguaClara team has addressed each of these shortcomings. The team has developed designs for hydraulic flocculators that are economical to construct. These designs are based on a combination of fundamental fluid mechanics as well as ongoing research. The team has invented a gravity powered flow control module that delivers a constant flow rate and that is adjusted simply by raising or lowering a flexible tube. The AguaClara team has committed to open source engineering (freely sharing all of our research findings and our design algorithms). Our strategy to reduce the engineering design costs is to both publish our design algorithms and create an automated, web-based, design tool that will enable partner organizations to obtain detailed design documentation including 3-D CAD drawings of an AguaClara plant that is customized to the size of local materials that will be used for construction. Although the AguaClara design process is sophisticated, the resulting designs appear deceptively simple and use components that can be repaired and replaced by the plant operators.
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