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 using local materials and are operated without 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 $1 per family.
The Challenge, Approaches, 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. Many municipal water treatment plants in the Global South have been inserted by developed nations, and they do not operate sustainably away from their normal supply chains, trained technicians, and capital investments. 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.
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. 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 installation as a customized design and the resulting engineering costs easily exceed the construction costs for small water treatment plants. The conventional solution to the high design costs was to rely on imported package plants. The lack of empirical experience or a theoretical basis for the design of small scale (communities less than 50,000) hydraulic flocculators has forced a reliance on simplistic designs using 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.
The 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 3-D CAD drawings of an AguaClara plant that is customized to the size of local materials that will be used for construction. The team has developed designs for hydraulic flocculators that are economical to construct. These designs are based on a combination of fundamental fluid mechanics and ongoing research. The team has invented a gravity powered Flow Controller that delivers a constant flow rate 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
AguaClara has already proven to be successful at treating turbid surface water on the municipal scale. Working with Agua Para el Pueblo, 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 (sponsored by Rotary and the Sanjuan fund) Honduras. Our largest design to date is a 2000 L/min plant 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 efforts.
Our Goals
Having shown that the AguaClara technology is successful in Honduras, we plan to expand to additional municipalities in Honduras and to begin extending to other countries in Latin America. Our 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 Honduras, Agua Para el Pueblo, will need financing of approximately $300,000 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 countries. Our growth model emphasizes 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 Asia.