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AguaClara is a project in the school of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University that is improving drinking water quality through innovative research, knowledge transfer, open source engineering and design of sustainable, replicable water treatment systems. The sustainability of the AguaClara technology is two fold, including physical and social sustainability.
The main goal of our project is the design and construction of water treatment plants in Honduras, but much thought also goes into with careful consideration of the implementation and integration of these plants into the communities in which they are built. This integration and implementation can be split up into two major categories of knowledge transfer and local sustainability.
Thus far, we have constructed one fully functioning water treatment plant in the town of Ojojona, Honduras. This plant is running and helping further AguaClara research for future plants via the data it returns. Currently, we are working on two projects. We are aiding the National Rural Water Association (NRWA) in retrofitting an existing water treatment plant with the AguaClara technology in the town of Marcala, Honduras and our a second plant in Tamara is in the final design stages with construction in Tamara, Honduras to begin in Januaryconstruction stages.
Beyond the physical design and construction of water treatment plants, the AguaClara project also focuses on knowledge transfer. This allows the receiving communities to be self sufficient and sustainable in plant maintenance and operation. Our plants are built with local labor with attention paid to educating plant operators and other local people about the technology. Over this past summer, an operator training workshop was held to explain the technology to local plant operators. AguaClara values education as the most valuable element of a successful development project. If the community understands the importance of clean water, the operators understand how the use the technology, and the community takes part (financially contributing labor and physicallylocal materials) in building the plant, then the chances of the community sustaining the technology are much higher.
AguaClara partners with a local organization, Agua Para el Pueblo (APP); this organization regional partner aids in site selection, construction and organization in Honduras. It is these local connections and knowledge sharing that makes our technology socially sustainable. Currently, APP is working to select the next candidate communities to receive an AguaClara water treatment plant.
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The next push for our project is to make our algorithms open source. We are working on the MathCAD and AutoCAD code necessary to create an internet format, such that anyone wanting to use the AguaClara design can input basic parameters about their town and the program will return a complete plant design.
As we move forward in our research we are testing variations of our existing flocculation model, including the relationship between velocity gradients and fluid mixing and floc formation, that should will make the AguaClara technology more efficient and less expensive.
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