AguaClara Concept Paper
Overview
AguaClara is a Cornell University project that is improving drinking water quality through innovative research, knowledge transfer, and design of sustainable and replicable water treatment systems. AguaClara water treatment plants are designed to treat turbid surface waters at the municipal scale. They are built by local labor using local materials, and they are operated without any electricity. AguaClara partners with local institutions, who build, operate, train, transfer, oversee, and monitor the water treatment plants to ensure long term sustainability. AguaClara plants have a one-time construction and capacity-building cost of less than $20 per person served. The annual fee for operation and maintenance is approximately $2 per person.
The Challenge
...
and the AguaClara Niche
Diarrheal diseases, mostly from unclean water, claim the lives of approximately 5000 children throughout the world every day. Sufficient and better quality drinking water and basic sanitation reduce this toll dramatically (UNICEF, 2005). Drinking untreated surface water and using it for bathing are major causes of waterborne disease. Recent trends in development work to provide water treatment have favored point-of-use treatment systems over municipal-scale projects. When coupled with basic sanitation, access to sufficient safe drinking water reduces this toll dramatically (UNICEF, 2005).
Many municipal water treatment plants in the Global South have been inserted by developed nations, and they do not operate sustainably . They are not sustainable when operated away from their normal supply chains, trained technicians, and capital investments, and it is common to see these plants sitting unused or broken in cities with unsafe water. In the communities that are capable of maintaining the complex machinery and computer systems in these plants, there is often a massive debt between the utility and the electric company.
AguaClara technology is an innovative way to bring economy of scale to water treatment, while maintaining simplicity of design that can be sustained even in impoverished regions. The AguaClara plants require no electricity and all repairs can be completed with local materials and labor. Plant designs are robust and scaled to meet the projected need in each community for years to come. The project also provides sustainable designs to cities and villages with smaller populations that often do not receive municipal treatment in Honduras.
Point of Use Treatment Systems
Point of use (POU) drinking water treatment systems recently have become a favored solution among many development organizations, but the challenges of training every household, the impossible task of monitoring water quality, and the high cost of replacing failed units have led to the renewed realization that appropriate municipal-scale water treatment systems could provide a more sustainable solution. POU systems may be the only viable option in rural communities or areas where water scarcity makes managing a distribution system difficult, but they are not necessarily cost-effective in villages and cities where there is access to a regular water supply.
Some POU advocates emphasize deficiencies in municipal scale treatment and distribution systems and encourage consumers to not trust tap water in order to promote their own solutions. Loss of confidence in municipal water systems undermines public willingness to finance such infrastructure, which even POU users count on for their water delivery source. POU technology is more expensive per liter of water treated, it treats only the water used for special purposes--rather than all water entering a home, --and it is often unobtainable by the poorest members of a community. Many households using POU treatment do not receive intensive training with their systems, and it is not uncommon to see these small systems used inappropriately. Working at the municipal scale provides a solution to nearly all of the concerns raised regarding POU water treatment.
Municipal Scale Treatment Systems
A series of shortcomings has prevented municipal water treatment plants from becoming a widely - supported tool for meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Environmental process engineers have viewed each Engineers view each municipal-scale installation as a customized custom design, and the resulting engineering costs easily often exceed the construction costs for small water treatment plants. The conventional solution to the these high design costs was has been to rely on imported package plants, which often become unused shortly after their inauguration, as explained above ("The Challenge and the AguaClara Niche"). The lack of empirical experience or a theoretical basis for the design of small scale (communities for designing water treatment plants for populations of less than 50,000 ) hydraulic flocculators has forced a reliance on simplistic generic packaged designs using that use electric power and imported components. No technology has been available for gravity powered dosing systems that could be calibrated and easily used to deliver chlorine and aluminum sulfate.This lack of knowledge about processes for small communities is what has driven the AguaClara team's work.
Our Successes
To make our plants successful, the AguaClara team works hard to address each of the shortcomings with municipal water treatment theory and practiceThe AguaClara team has addressed each of these shortcomings. 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 . These downloadable designs will include 3-D CAD drawings of an AguaClara plant that is are customized to the size of local materials that will be used for constructionconstructing key features.
The team has developed designs for hydraulic flocculators municipal plants that are economical to construct at only $20 per person served for construction and start-up, plus $2 per person per year for operations and maintenance. These designs are based on a combination of fundamental fluid mechanics and ongoing research. The team has invented a gravity powered Flow Controller chemical dosing system that delivers a constant precise flow rate of coagulant 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). Although the AguaClara design process is sophisticated, the resulting designs appear deceptively simple and use components that can be repaired and replaced by plant operators.
Our Successes
chlorine, two chemicals that are necessary for reducing turbidity and disinfecting water. The chemical dosing rate can be easily set by a plant operator based on influent water turbidity, which removes the need for electric pumps used for dosing in most other plants.
AguaClara has already proven to be successful at treating turbid surface water on the municipal scale. Working with Agua Para el Pueblo (APP), a Honduran NGO, AguaClara has designed water treatment plants that are working effectively and providing safe, clean water to 2000 people in Ojojona, and 3500 people in Tamara Honduras (sponsored by Rotary and the Sanjuan fund) Honduras. Our largest design to date is a 2000 L/min plant for 5500 people in Marcala (sponsored by IRWA with construction supervision by IRWA and ADEC and serving 5400 people). Construction of a new plant in Cuatro Comunidades is soon to start, and a new site will be chosen for the next fundraising effortsThe newest plant, for Cuatro Comunidades with a population 2000, is just coming online. This brings the total number of people served by our technology up to 13,000.
Our Goals
Having shown that the AguaClara technology is successful in Honduras, we plan to expand to additional municipalities in continue expanding throughout Honduras and to begin extending to other countries in Latin America. Our long-term goal is that AguaClara plants serving a total of at least 20,000 people be constructed in Honduras by the summer of 2009. Our partner in Hondurasto secure partner organizations around the world that can oversee construction and fundraising for treatment plants in their regions.
Our first priority is to establish a truly robust and sustainable base with our partnerships in Honduras. Currently our central partner, Agua Para el Pueblo, will need to secure financing of approximately $300$160,000 over the next two years to meet this goal . Recognizing the global Global Demand for AguaClara Technology for this technology, we seek to develop a network of Implementation Partners who are dedicated to knowledge transfer and capacity building and who can help disseminate the technology in other countriesof stability. Our growth model emphasizes a South-to-South spread with strategic North-to-South collaborations. We propose holding a workshop in Tegucigalpa, Honduras to meet with NGOs from Latin America and to begin the training process with new regional partners. Our Five year plan includes starting a second launch site in Africa or AsiaThis model is the most sustainable for AguaClara because it utilizes the capacity of our partners to share their firsthand experiences working with our designs, and it provides new sites with a network of local supporters. Our reliance on local capacity building is the main driver behind fundraising for AguaClara operations in Honduras. When our partners in Honduras are secure and our Cornell laboratory is well funded, then we can begin expanding AguaClara along lines of global partnerships.