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Winter 2015 Contributions
The following winter, some fellow members of the Ram Pump Team and I integrated this system into the Jesus de Otoro plant in Honduras to work on field testing. The ram pump did work, but at an almost insignificant flow rate, we believed due to an inefficient spring for the system.
Spring 2017 Contributions
After an extended hiatus due to studying abroad and related requirements, I returned to the Ram Pump Team during senior spring. The team advanced significantly in the past few years, particularly in adding a distribution system and another air chamber to the testing module. The focus of this semester was to figure out how to effectively tune the ram pump for low driving head values, which occurs in some of the plants in Honduras. As a group, we tested how the variation of top standoff displacement, bottom standoff displacement and spring constant affected the pump performance at low driving heads. We then proceeded to formulate a mathematical model to be used to calculate spring constant from available driving head. We left the model in its beginning stages as the semester ended.
Thank you to Monroe, all of the amazing students I have been fortunate enough to work with and learn from and the team in Honduras, for all working hard to provide clean water in a sustainable manner. This has truly been one of the best experiences of my time at Cornell and I am so thankful to have been able to be a part of it!