Nicholas Parisi's Individual Contribution Page

Past:

I took CEE1113 freshman year where I was first introduced to the Agua Clara technology and the idea of municipal water treatment design. In the spring of 2012 I was enrolled in CEE 2550 and worked on the design team to help design the CDC and components of the stock tank. This past fall in CEE 3540 I was able to fully understand the theory behind Agua Clara technology and currently am on the Village Source team. I plan to focus research on waste management in our village scenarios as well as household infrastructure which can better clean water preservation and distribution. 

"Semester" Contributions

This semester has been a great experience. Participating on a research team has been different than when I previously worked on the Design Team. Although the 'Village Source to Environment' team was new this year, I loved the freedom as well as the lack of precedence we were presented with to tackle our challenge of designing an equitable distribution system. 

This semester, I, along with my teammate Diana focused on the solar aspect of the group code to eventually output information regarding necessary solar panels, system cost and daily flow levels. 

Our group has designed an equitable flow system which uses a three-tiered piping system and solar pump to replace the current elevated storage tank. We initially did not anticipate how interconnected the challenge was, and how we needed to iterate our calculations multiple times within our code, checking whether the calculated solutions matched with real world data. We modeled our solar pump system after a project from a previous class where we used given solar data and from there calculated required parameters such as head equity, flow levels and pipe lengths, and then compared our calculations with real world hourly weather data for the area in India where the Gufu village is located. 

Diana and I completed code and algorithms which check for variability with weather data and assess how many days will not provide sufficient solar energy to pump water from the village well to the distribution system. We incorporated real world scenarios where pump efficiency, flow and panel output are all variable with weather patterns. Our code then through various iterations decides how many solar panels are needed to minimize consecutive days with insufficient water supply.