Concept
In order to help AguaClara grow into a professional organization, it was necessary to create a single document that will give interested engineers a succinct technical description of Aguaclara plants and processes. The document has been integrated into the AguaClara Design Tool, and it automatically tailors equations and variables to a specific design. This allows engineers and other interested local officials to reasonably estimate the feasibility of constructing an AguaClara plant in their community.
Audience
The documentation is meant to be read by municipal engineers who are interested in building a plant using AguaClara designs. As such, it will contain technical information at a sufficient depth to give a general overview. This will include important equations, customized design values, and elevations taken from AutoCAD drawings.
It is expected to be useful for other people besides the engineers, such as people involved in the construction process. However, the documentation will be designed first with the engineers in mind.
Contents
The final document will be organized in the following manner:
First, there will be a summary of the user specified values that were used in the design.
Then, there will be an overview of the AguaClara technology which will go through the purification process from beginning to end, describing each step. Specific steps include the chemical doser, rapid mixer, flocculation, the inlet channel, sedimentation, and the exit channel.
Each section will include the design values generated by the design tool (for example, the length of each of the baffles in the vertical flocculator, the number of flocculator channels required, etc)
The complexity of sedimentation requires that it be broken down into the following sections:
1. Inlet pipe
2. Slopes (bottom geometry)
3. Plate settler support frame
4. Plate settlers
5. Plate settler modules
6. Effluent launder
7. Sludge Drains
The Materials List section will summarize the materials needed for construction. This practical resource currently covers the Entrance Tank, the Flocculator, and the Sedimentation Tank. As a compact source of information, this section provides at-a-glance access for all users of the Design Tool, whether AguaClara members or users from around the world, to compare plant designs.
Finally, there will be a more general discussion of the capabilities of the AguaClara process. This section will discuss why a process that achieves such high turbidity removal without any input of electricity at all whatsoever is truly revolutionary. It will also touch on current research efforts focused on further improving effluent water quality (for example, the development of floc blankets and filtration systems).
How it works
Upon completion, the AguaClara manual will give engineers a general overview of the Aguaclara process and it will also provide a tailored set of values pertinent to the design under consideration. These values will be inserted into the document automatically through the use of a LabView script which will replace variables with custom values for the design. LabView will also take advantage of "switches" built in with Microsoft Word fields (Please see the separate set of instructions which were prepared regarding how to use MS Word Fields). This will allow the document to be customized to provide information about options such as horizontal or vertical flocculation.
Final Notes
1. The AguaClara manual is meant to be used as a reference - for a complete set of design values and drawings, engineers will still have to reference the rest of the documents and drawings provided by the design tool.
2. We are trying to develop a process whereby drawings would be plotted automatically in AutoCAD