...
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 design 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.
...