Design Projects
Agalteca
Atima
Cuatro Comunidades
The Cuatro Comunidades plant is serving these 4 communities: Los Bayos, Rio Frio, Las Jaguas, and Aldea Bonito. By design, the plant is relatively smaller - the plant flow rate is 100.4 gal/min. However, this plant will be the first plant to include the sedimentation tank slopes (inlet triangular manifold), and exit channel, and a hoper for the floc blanket. Each sedimentation tank has 2 inlet slopes. Given the specific energy dissipation rate, velocities for the entrance channel, connections to the manifolds, and manifolds, are all constrained to not break up flocs and minimize the floc sedimentation. Single width sedimentation tanks were used for the design, and were made to be shallower than previous ones.
Details of the design can be found below.
Gracias
We began the semester trying out new set-ups for the Gracias community which required a flowrate much higher than previous designs. Quanititatively, the flow rate for our plant designs have increased from 500 gal/min in Marcala to 1600 gal/min in Gracias. The design results can be seen below.
Due to the large flow rate, it was ultimately decided that Gracias would have a triple width sed tank--there will be 3 pairs of slopes for each sed tank. The variable widths of the sed tank will later be automated to account for higher flowrates. Experimental setups are included below that discuss the different alternatives we considered, such as varying the width of the sed tank (or number of pairs of slopes) and number of sed tanks.
Ecuador Design
The Ecuador pilot plant was designed for a University professor. The plant was designed to have a flow rate of 3L/s. This pilot facility is designed to be viewed by other communities in the hope of encouraging the AguaClara technology as a water treatment option. This design will further allow research to be conducted by including redundant systems.
Tamara
Marcala
The plant in Marcala was built in partnership with Fred Stotlemeyer and NRWA. It was designed as a retrofit on an existing plant structure. The typical AguaClara layout was altered so that our design would fit in the existing tanks. At the time of completion in July 2008 Marcala was the largest plant designed by AguaClara; currently it has only been surpassed in size by the Gracias plant.
Ojojona
La34
La 34 was the first plant constructed by the AguaClara team. It is the only plant that uses a horizontal flow flocculator technique.
- [Community Details and Construction]
Design Modifications
As the AguaClara team continues to build plants and continues to learn more about the details of optimizing water treatment processes, changes are made to the design algorithms. For an outline of what significant changes we have made designs over the years check out the Design Modifications Page