AguaClara Concept Paper
Overview
AguaClara is a Cornell University project that is improving drinking water quality through innovative research, knowledge transfer, and design of sustainable and scalable water treatment systems. AguaClara water treatment plants are designed to treat turbid surface waters at the municipal scale, built using local materials, and operated without electricity. AguaClara partners with local institutions who build, operate, train, transfer, oversee, and monitor the water treatment plants to ensure long term sustainability. AguaClara plants have a one-time construction and capacity-building cost of less than $20 per person. The monthly fee for operation and maintenance is approximately $1 per family.
The Challenge, Approaches, and the AguaClara Niche
Diarrheal diseases from easily preventable causes claim the lives of approximately 5000 young children throughout the world every day. Sufficient and better quality drinking water and basic sanitation reduce this toll dramatically (UNICEF). Distributing untreated surface waters as drinking water is one of the causes of waterborne disease. Point of use and municipal scale treatment schemes are two potential solutions. In recent years, conventional municipal water treatment and supply systems have been seen as an unsustainable and expensive strategy for providing safe drinking water in low-income communities in underdeveloped countries. This conclusion is based on the failure of conventional technologies, developed for use in the first world, that have been inserted in third world settings, which lack ready access to supply chains, trained technicians, and sufficient capital.
Point of Use Treatment Systems
Point of Use (POU) drinking water treatment systems recently have become a favored solution among many development organizations, but the challenges of training every household, the impossible task of monitoring water quality, and the high cost of replacing failed units has led to the renewed realization that appropriate municipal scale water treatment systems could provide a more sustainable solution. While recognizing that POU solutions may be the only viable option in rural communities where piped distribution systems would be too costly or where water scarcity makes managing a distribution system difficult, the AguaClara team is proposing a corrective to the current emphasis on POU technologies where municipal scale treatment and distribution would be more economical and sustainable and would better meet the needs of the poorest members of the communities.
Some POU advocates emphasize deficiencies in municipal scale treatment and distribution systems and encourage consumers to not trust tap water in order to promote their own solutions. Loss of confidence in municipal water systems undermines public willingness to finance such infrastructure, which even POU users count on for their water delivery source. POU water treatment is more expensive per person, treats only the drinking water rather than all water entering a home, and is often unobtainable by the poorest members of a community. There are numerous advantages to working at the municipal level including economies of scale, fewer maintenance personnel to train, and treatment of all of the water that goes into a home.
Municipal Scale Treatment Systems
A series of shortcomings has prevented municipal water treatment plants from becoming an effective tool for meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Environmental process engineers have viewed each installation as a customized design and the resulting engineering costs easily exceed the construction costs for small water treatment plants. The conventional solution to the high design costs was to rely on imported package plants. The lack of empirical experience or a theoretical basis for the design of small scale (communities less than 50,000) hydraulic flocculators has forced a reliance on simplistic designs using electric power and imported components. No technology has been available for gravity powered dosing systems that could be calibrated and easily used to deliver chlorine and aluminum sulfate.
The AguaClara team has addressed each of these shortcomings. Our strategy to reduce the engineering design costs is to both publish our design algorithms and create an automated, web-based, design tool that will enable partner organizations to obtain detailed design documentation including 3-D CAD drawings of an AguaClara plant that is customized to the size of local materials that will be used for construction. The team has developed designs for hydraulic flocculators that are economical to construct. These designs are based on a combination of fundamental fluid mechanics and ongoing research. The team has invented a gravity powered Flow Controller Research that delivers a constant flow rate and that is adjusted simply by raising or lowering a flexible tube. The AguaClara team has committed to open source engineering (freely sharing all of our research findings and our design algorithms). Although the AguaClara design process is sophisticated, the resulting designs appear deceptively simple and use components that can be repaired and replaced by plant operators.
Our successes
AguaClara has already proven to be successful at treating turbid surface water on the municipal scale. Working with Agua Para el Pueblo, a Honduran NGO, AguaClara has designed a water treatment plant that is working effectively and providing safe, clean water to 2000 people in Ojojona, Honduras. Two more plants are under construction in the Honduran towns of Marcala (sponsored by IRWA with construction supervision by IRWA and ADEC and serving 5400 people) and Tamara (sponsored by Rotary and the Sanjuan fund with construction supervision by APP and serving 3500 people).
Our goals
Having shown that the AguaClara technology is successful in Honduras, we plan to expand to additional municipalities in Honduras and to begin extending to other countries in Latin America. Our goal is that AguaClara plants serving a total of at least 15,000 people be constructed in Honduras by the summer of 2009. Our partner in Honduras, Agua Para el Pueblo, will need financing of approximately $300,000 to meet this goal. Recognizing the global demand for this technology, we seek to develop a network of Implementation Partners who are dedicated to knowledge transfer and capacity building and who can help disseminate the technology in other countries. Our growth model emphasizes South to South spread with strategic North to South collaborations. We propose holding a workshop in Tegucigalpa, Honduras this summer to meet with NGOs from Latin America and to begin the training process with new regional partners. Our 3 year plan includes starting a second launch site in Africa or Asia.