Challenges Spring 2012

Please review the challenges below and fill out the Team Organization Survey.

Our challenges for the Spring of 2012 are designed to make it easier for new communities to adopt the AguaClara technologies. Our goals are to reduce costs, extend our designs to lower flow rates, improve our documentation, and create an AguaClara business to facilitate spread of the technologies.

We will have a renewed focus on optimizing all of our unit processes with the goal of reducing construction costs. Now that we have a zero electricity filtration system and an expectation that we will be bringing floc blankets online later this year, we have an opportunity to reduce the size of our flocculator and sedimentation tank. We intend to evaluate the feasibility of using floc recycle from the floc blanket to the flocculator as a way to increase collisions in the flocculator and thus allow us to significantly decrease the flocculator residence time. Do you know of any research on floc recycle for drinking water treatment?

We will be pushing the technology to an even smaller scale with a goal of meeting the needs for communities all the way down to 100 people. That will require developing new fabrication techniques for both flocculation (pipe flocculator with obstacles) and filtration (filter in a pipe).

We are exploring options for developing an AguaClara business to separate the implementation side from the R&D effort. Of course, the goal is to keep communication between implementation and R&D so that we can continue to improve the technologies based on feedback from the field.

We realize that we need a finance model that is as innovative as our technology. We will be exploring models for having communities pay back short term loans to reduce dependency on donor funds. Our effort to reduce costs is another part of this strategy.

Admin team challenges

Research team challenges

Design team challenges (Drew Hart)

The design team will need 5-8 students who are willing to specialize in creating the Mathcad code to design and draw the AguaClara facilities.
The design team challenges are available in a separate google doc.