Author: Monroe Weber-Shirk

Our Progress
AguaClara has already proven to be successful at treating turbid surface water on the municipal scale. In 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 2,000 people in Ojojona, Honduras. Two more plants are under currently construction in the Honduran towns of Marcala (serving 5,400 people) and Tamara (serving 3,500 people).
Geographic expansion
Building upon the demonstrated success of the AguaClara technology in Honduras, we plan to expand to additional municipalities in Honduras and to begin introducing our technology to other countries in Latin America. In doing so, we hope to have AguaClara plants, serving a total of at least 15,000 people, 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.

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. Please send any donations to:
AguaClara 220 Hollister Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853
Monroe Weber-Shirk AguaClara Project Coordinator mw24@cornell.edu (607) 255-8445

AguaClara
“Improving drinking water quality through innovative research, knowledge transfer, open source engineering and design of sustainable, replicable water treatment systems.”

aguaclara.cee.cornell.edu

The Challenge
To create safe drinking water for the more than 1 billion people who don’t have access to safe water.
Our Research
AguaClara is engaged in several areas of research in order to understand how best to improve the efficiency and robustness of our treatment technology. One ongoing area of research is the investigation of flocculation effectiveness through studying the hydrodynamics of flock formation and break-up in the laboratory. Other teams are testing the performance of various prototype designs in a scaled down pilot plant located at Cornell's Water Filtration Plant as well as with a table-top size demonstration plant in the laboratory. In addition to testing and experimentation, AguaClara is also using computational fluid dynamic software to understand the flow conditions occurring inside our hydraulic flocculators to ultimately improve their design.

The AguaClara Advantage
Our municipal water treatment plants use flocculation and sedimentation to treat turbid surface waters in a clever, simple and affordable way. Our plants are gravity powered and built on site using local materials.
Affordability
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, because Aguaclara produces clean drinking water without electricity. Also notable is that AguaClara makes this affordable: they have a one-time construction and capacity-building cost of less than $20 per person, and the monthly fee for operation and maintenance is approximately $1 per family.

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 hopefully make it possible for engineers to access 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 possible for engineers with internet access to rapidly design a water treatment plant given a design flow rate and a few additional parameters.