Documentation

Concept

In order to help AguaClara grow into a professional organization, we have found it necessary to create a single document that will give interested engineers a succinct technical description of Aguaclara plants and processes. Ideally, 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.

Audience

The documentation is meant to be read by engineers working for municipalities that are interested in building a plant using our 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.

It is expected to be useful for other people besides the engineers, such as people involved in the construction process. However, the documentation will be designed first with the engineers in mind.

Contents

The final document will be organized in the following manner:

First, we will provide an overview of the Aguaclara technology. We will run 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 chemical doser, rapid mixing, 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 be broken down into several different sections:
1. Inlet pipe
2. Slopes
3. Lamella
4. Effluent launder
5. Drains

Second, we will discuss the AguaClara process and its limitations more generally. This section is still in its infancy, but we plan to 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 the costs associated with the construction of an AguaClara plant. We will break the costs down by type (upfront, during construction, etc..), and we will provide 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.

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 will also take advantage of this to turn "switches" built in with Microsoft Word fields (Please see the separate set of instructionswhich we have prepared regarding how to use MS Word Fields). This will allow us to do things like provide information about either horizontal or vertical flocculation based on the specific design.

Final Note

We would like to emphasize 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 the design tool and open the documents that it generates.