Diana Kelterborn, Sarah Levine, Nicholas Parisi, Rachel Whiteheart
Abstract
The newly formed Village Source to Environment Team combines the design of a distribution storage plan and wastewater treatment system for rural villages in India. Current distribution infrastructure consists of an elevated tank that fills and dispenses twice daily, each time supplying half the village’s water needs. This method is inefficient and inconvenient, since villagers can only obtain water when the tank dispenses and must carry it half a kilometer to their homes. This system also makes it impossible to ensure that each family receives their designated share of water. Furthermore, due to limited access to water, villages improvise unsanitary household storage. They obtain all water for washing, drinking and cooking from these open containers, meaning the entire source can be contaminated any time they use it. Our proposed distribution system will 2 pump water directly into villagers’ homes, replacing the elevated storage tank with smaller household tanks. Each tank will connect to a sink for sanitary use on demand. Additionally, the sink’s drain will allow us to eventually integrate a wastewater treatment or irrigation system. Small villages with limited resources often lack sanitary solutions for handling greywater and blackwater; we hope future teams will investigate strategies for treating wastewater for irrigation. Our work builds upon capstone design projects from the Fall 2013 CEE 4540 class that focused on a distribution system for the village of Gufu, India. We revised the distribution design and planned to add household storage tanks, however the distribution system design took the majority of our focus this semester. This new team was formed to facilitate AguaClara’s expansion to India. The local infrastructure, community sizes, and therefore required flow rates, differ significantly from those in Honduras. As a result, the team must take a very different approach to the problem. The Village Source to Environment Team has laid the foundation for distribution design this semester.
