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In January of 2016, before beginning this semester, I traveled to Honduras with 20 or so other AguaClara team members to tour AguaClara plants in Honduras and gain a more thorough understanding and appreciation for AguaClara's mission and method of operation. While there, I worked with team member Priya Aggarwal to fix existing broken ram pumps within plants, and occasionally fabricate entirely new pumps from whatever we could scavenge from local hardware stores.
Spring 2016
Continuing with the ram pump team, this semester I worked to redesign and refabricate the ram pump to make the system self-contained. Previously, the water that was required to drive the pump but that was not actually pumped (called 'unpumped water') would simply be ejected into the air. The previous design required a concrete box to be placed around the ram pump to capture the ejected water, since it was clean and treated, and therefore very valuable. After many iterations and designs, My team member and I constructed and begun to test a new, enclosed ram pump which can be placed in line with vertical pipe, in which the unpumped water simply continues its route through the pipe.
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This was my first semester with AguaClara
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being a research advisor. I advised two subteams: Ram Pump and 1 LPS fabrication. Being a research advisor is very different from being a team member, and both my knowledge of the teams I was advising and my leadership skills increased by leaps and bounds through this new perspective. I was the resident expert on the ram pump and fabricating the 1 LPS plant due to my prior experience, and my task was to communicate and pass on my knowledge and experience. It took time and practice for me to figure out the best way to disseminate knowledge and explain why and how things worked to new team members, though by the end of the semester I felt I had improved vastly in that respect, and the teams were functioning far more smoothly.
Spring 2017
Currently I remain the advisor to the Ram Pump subteam, and I am also on the Enclosed Stacked Rapid Sand Filter (EStaRS) subteam. The current challenge with the EStaRS is making it short enough to be used in series with the 1 LPS plant. The Fall 2016 EStaRS team created a design that would lower the depth of the sand beds in the filter to accommodate this new height constraint, and also switched the piping connecting the entrance and exit tanks to the filter from flexible to rigid tubing. This semester we are working to fabricate the EStaRS filter. We have also made edits to the design, including increasing the diameter of the piping to reduce headloss and ensure an equal flow distribution to each of the sand beds.