Page History

...

In order to help AguaClara grow into a professional organization, we have found it was necessary to create a single document that will give interested engineers a succinct technical description of Aguaclara plants and processes. Ideally, the The document will be integrated into the AguaClara Design Tool, and it will automatically tailor equations and variables to a specific design. This will allow engineers and other interested local officials to reasonably estimate the feasibility of constructing an AguaClara plant in their community.

...

The documentation is meant to be read by municipal engineers working for municipalities that who are interested in building a plant using our AguaClara designs. As such, it will contain technical information at a sufficient depth to give a general overview. This will include important equations, customized design values, and elevations taken from AutoCAD drawings.

...

The final document will be organized in the following manner:

First, we there will provide be an overview of the Aguaclara technology . We which will run go through the purification process from beginning to end, describing each of the steps that are taken along the way. Specifically, we will focus on the step. Specific steps include the chemical doser, rapid mixingmixer, flocculation, the inlet channel, sedimentation, and the exit channel. Each section will include the customized mathematical values generated by the design tool (for example, the length of each of the baffles in the vertical flocculator, the number of flocculator channels required, etc)

Because sedimentation is such an involved process, it will The complexity of sedimentation requires that it be broken down into several different the following sections:
1. Inlet pipe
2. Slopes
3. Lamella
4. Effluent launder
5. Drains

Second , we will discuss will be a more general discussion of the limitations of the AguaClara process and its limitations more generally. This section is still in its infancy, but we plan to will discuss the reasons why a process that uses no electricity can only remove turbidity to a certain extent. This is one of the main reasons why AguaClara plants cannot currently be constructed in the United States.

Third, we will discuss be a discussion the costs associated with the construction of an AguaClara plant. We will break the costs The costs will be broken down by type (upfront, during construction, etc..), and we the section will provide conclude with a ballpark estimate of the total price tag of a plant.

Finally, we will provide a brief description of past Aguaclara plants and current research will be included.

How it works

Upon completion, the AguaClara manual will be extremely beneficial because it will give engineers a general overview of the Aguaclara process, but it will also provide a tailored set of values pertinent to the design under consideration. These values will be inserted into the document automatically through the use of a LabView script which will replace variables with custom values for the design. We LabView will also take advantage of this to turn "switches" built in with Microsoft Word fields (Please see the separate set of instructions which we have were prepared regarding how to use MS Word Fields). This will allow us to do things like the document to be customized to provide information about either options such as horizontal or vertical flocculation based on the specific design.

Final Note

We would like to emphasize It should be noted that the AguaClara manual we are creating is meant to be used as a reference - for a complete set of mathematical values and drawings, engineers will still have to run reference the rest of the documents and drawings provided by the design tool and open the documents that it generates.