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The AguaClara Program was launched in 2005 as a collaborative venture between Cornell University and Agua Para el Pueblo, a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Honduras. Since its inception, the AguaClara Program has become a growing global network of organizations that are working together to provide safe drinking water for resource poor cities and towns. At the global scale, AguaClara is a novel approach to infrastructure design, sustainability, knowledge generation, challenge-based education, and invention. AguaClara integrates innovation, research, Automated Design Tool, education, implementation, and empowerment. Partners include multiple non governmental organizations, towns with AguaClara facilities, donor organizations, Cornell students, and Cornell University. Together these partners create win-win-win-win-win relationships with outcomes that benefit all of the partners. Each of the partners offers unique capabilities that are needed by the other partners in order to obtain the desired outcome of safe drinking water on tap for communities that lack this basic necessity for quality of life. Current AguaClara partners include:
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AguaClara at Cornell is a center for research and Automated Design Tool of sustainable engineered processes for surface water treatment. As opposed to point of use devices that provide water to individuals, AguaClara systems provide drinking water at the municipal scale. Cornell student research teams learn to use state of the art process control to automate parametric testing. The automated systems make it possible for teams to conduct sophisticated experiments without continuous presence. This in turn makes it possible for student teams to conduct experiments along with their other coursework. Experimental automation also makes it possible to explore a wider parameter space per unit time, allowing student teams to thoroughly test their ideas and to quickly adapt their hypotheses to respond to new results. The research teams generate knowledge that is used to improve AguaClara designs and create new treatment processes. An important incentive to students in AguaClara research teams is that they get to see the results of their work built and used to benefit people.
The AguaClara project teams at Cornell synthesizes their rapidly evolving knowledge into an online design tool that is used by implementation partners to design municipal drinking water treatment plants. This design tool is an AguaClara innovation that creates customized designs on demand using the power of computer automation. The AguaClara Automated Design Tool team creates dimensionally correct, scalable algorithms to convert the physical constraints (as determined through research) into water treatment plant dimensions, flow velocities, and energy dissipation rates. These algorithms incorporate materials databases to ensure that the designs can be constructed using generic locally available materials.
The online design tool is used by partner organizations to design municipal water treatment plants that they then build. The online automated design tool is one of the core inventions of the AguaClara program at Cornell and is a key component of the strategy to disseminate AguaClara technology globally through a network of multiple implementation partners. The design tool creates in 5 minutes a customized design that is valued at over $10,000. The high cost of custom engineering designs is one of the factors that has prevented small cities with limited financial resources from building municipal drinking water treatment plants.
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AguaClara at Cornell thrives on an integrated research and Automated Design Tool team that incorporates Ph.D., M.S., M.Eng., and undergraduate students. Undergraduates are empowered to design experiments, build apparatus, program automated parametric testing, test hypotheses, analyze data, and draw conclusions. By working in small teams and by having state-of-the-art automation capabilities, we find that undergraduates are able to conduct meaningful research and generate knowledge. Students learn best by doing, and while conducting research they integrate what they are learning in all their coursework.
Graduate students supervise undergraduate researchers and learn invaluable research and team management skills that will serve them well as they move into faculty positions.
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