Author: Monroe Weber-Shirk

Our Mission
To improve drinking water quality through innovative research, knowledge transfer, open source engineering and design of sustainable, replicable water treatment systems.
Our Partners
The strength of AguaClara lies in its partnerships. Our Honduran partner is Agua Para el Pueblo (APP), an NGO that has specialized in building small-scale water supply systems since 1984. APP selects the communities that our project works with, supervises construction, and provides long-range technical support.
Our Cornell home in Civil and Environmental Engineering provides talented and motivated students, superb research facilities, and a commitment to applying our wealth of resources to practical problems.
Cornell Students
“Working on the Ojojona water treatment project this semester has been a crash course both in terms of the breadth of material learned, and the skills acquired in working as part of a large team. The weekly meetings ... have continued to fuel my enthusiasm for this project, and my hopes for a long term greater good that can result from it.” — Shada El-Sharif

To Donate
The AguaClara project depends on grants and donations from foundations and individuals as well as support from Cornell University. Project funds are used to build water treatment plants in Honduras, to support Cornell interns in Honduras, to research and develop an improved flocculation design, to create the design algorithms for the plants, and for project management.
We invite you to help the Sanjuan Fund support AguaClara. Send a note with a reference to “Sanjuan Fund support of AguaClara” along with your check to Cornell University. Send the check to:
AguaClara 220 Hollister Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853
For More Information
Visit the project website: http://aguaclara.cee.cornell.edu
Or Contact:
Monroe Weber-Shirk AguaClara Project Coordinator mw24@cornell.edu (607) 255-8445

Clear Water

Empowering
Small Communities
With Sustainable
Water Purification
Technology

AguaClara
Clear Water

The Challenge
Create safe drinking water for the more than 1 billion people who don’t have access to safe water.
Commitment to Sustainability
We have designed a low-cost, high performance technology that can be built from local materials and labor. Most importantly- for our goal of sustainability- is that we are working to ensure that local institutions are empowered to sustain the technology. This involves training, technical support, and monitoring capabilities.
Our student interns provide training to community water boards and plant operators and to the technical staff of Agua Para el Pueblo (APP). An APP employee provides technical support to the plant operators. We provide communities with the necessary monitoring equipment so they efficiently operate the water treatment plant and document the performance.

The Technology Choices
The three main strategies used to provide communities with clean drinking water on the market now are municipal scale water treatment plants (like AguaClara), expensive bottled water, and low cost point of use systems that can be used to produce small amounts of clean water. A cost analysis reveals that a family of 6 would pay more for 2 liters per day per person using point of use systems than they would using an AguaClara municipal system for all their water.
The AguaClara Technology
The AguaClara technology is an adaptation of conventional water treatment that is used in the U.S. to produce drinkable water from surface waters. Of the typically used processes: flocculation, sedimentation, filtration and disinfection, AguaClara uses all except filtration to producing clean drinking water without electricity.
The AguaClara team has developed improved meters for adding alum & chlorine solutions in the treatment plant. These metering devices are gravity powered and rely on a simply float valve and calibrated flow control device.
Open Source Engineering
We are dedicated to providing open access to all of our design work using web based design tools. This commitment to open source engineering will make it possible for engineers with internet access to rapidly design a water treatment plant given a design flow rate and a few additional parameters.