Jonathan Erickson’s recent newsletter post for Dr. Dobb’s highlights a couple of the low-tech water development projects of Engineers without Borders: specifically, projects to bring clean drinking water to two villages in Honduras, designed and managed by USC students Liana Ching and Jackie Reed. Their scheme rests on
…a pair of 10,000-gallon storage tank[s] with a chlorination system (via tablets) upstream, away from the pollution.
But designing a system that would work in a remote village with no electricity is no small feat. The design they eventually came up with is a self-sustaining dam and water pump that uses paddles to carry water to a tank before it gets distributed by pipes to the villages.
“The students had to learn from scratch,” says Mansour Rahimi, their advisor and an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering. “There is no software, no tables or books on this.” Dana Sherman, a senior lecturer also in the industrial and systems engineering department, added that “the project involves so much more than just designing and installing a pump system…[it also involves] implementing a system that does not require consistent or difficult maintenance.”