Village Source to Environment

Village Source to Environment

This subteam's primary goal is to design a distributed storage system for a village water supply. (Six teams from CEE 4540 Fall 2013 explored options. Background information is available) Our system will be based on Gufu Village in India. Solar-powered pumps will draw water from a well half a kilometer outside the village and pump it through a transmission line to the village, then through a three-tiered system of pipes to each house. Lengths of tubing at each house will restrict the flow rate and ensure equity, so that no house receives significantly more water than any other house. Our code sizes a PV array and optimizes pipe and tubing sizes based on equity constraints, local weather data, desired flow rate, and system cost. 

In future semesters, this team will need to size household storage tanks equipped with float valves to replace the villager's current improvised household storage. Another goal of this team will be to evaluate options for handling both human waste and greywater at the household/village level. This could include anything from redesign of the toilet (use less or no water) to design of a greywater treatment system that will allow households to repurpose their wastewater safely.  The code will also need to be modified to account for growth and variability, ensuring that the system can adapt to any rural village.