Patrick Farnham's Individual Contribution Page

Spring 2011 Contributions

Along with my teammates Michael Liu, Weiling Xu, and Dominick Amador, I conducted research toward the development of an efficient, inexpensive water pump used to lift water from the Aguaclara sedimentation tank to the chemical stock tank.

Along with my team, I looked into two pump designs available in Honduras, the EMAS Flexi Hand Pump and the traditional rope pump. When neither looked feasible for use with Aguaclara due to performance and space constraints, we analyzed three basic pump designs in order to see if we could construct them on-site in Honduras.

Our lever-powered piston pump and foot-driven treadle pump looked feasible when analyzed in MathCAD, but our piston seal was found to be inadequate in testing which seemed to render these pumps inadequate.

Our diaphragm pump was much more promising, achieving a flow rate of 0.88 L/s during testing and requiring the least expensive combination of materials.