Water Supply System Design Tool

Water Supply System Design Tool

Stephanie Arbelovsky

James Berg

Leah De Riel

Lindsay Ellis

Martin Kistenmacher

Luke Miller

Meaghan O'Neil

Amy Pickering

Kelly Saikkonen

Dawn Sedorovich

Jennifer Talotta

Haichen Wang

Tracy Wise

Xinning Zhang

Partner Organizations: Cornell University and Water For People

Proposal Date: 3/26/03

Executive Summary

Clean water is a basic human right that is necessary for life and one’s well being, yet many people in the world do not have access to reliable, uncontaminated water sources. Nonprofit organizations are working to remedy this situation by improving access to sanitary water supplies in third world countries. This involves designing and building collection, distribution, and sometimes water treatment facilities. Since this work is being done mainly by non-governmental organizations with tight budgets and limited funding, costs must be minimized while maintaining a quality product. It is therefore in the best interests of all involved parties, from the NGO’s and engineers to the recipient community, to have access to dependable sources of information and standardized design procedures.

Water for People (WFP) is a not for profit organization that uses the volunteer skills of water quality professionals to improve access to safe drinking water worldwide. WFP is dedicated to helping communities who are interested in improving their quality of life, and are willing to make a long-term, sustainable effort to do so. A design tool is currently unavailable for use in designing water distribution systems in rural areas, a common project of Water for People. Although several spreadsheets have been set up for individual projects, there is no unified tool that provides a basic procedure and allows designers to understand the entire process. Numbers and values are often entered by hand, with no referencing, and formulas are buried within the spreadsheet. Our team will examine these spreadsheets that have already been used for successful implementation of a water quality project. Using the knowledge gained from this analysis, a design tool will be created using the modification of an existing spreadsheet or, if necessary, a brand new series of spreadsheets.

This design tool will be clearly referenced and understandable to the interested designer, and will only require the input of key system properties before automatically generating a recommended design. This will save time for the system designers, and will enable them to quickly and easily examine the effect that different assumptions have on the design. Our team has a wealth of resources at our disposal, which will enable us to create a reliable tool. Our location at Cornell University provides access to a great deal of information and professional expertise. Top-notch students, who will be creating the design tool, have a variety of interests and experiences, which will also be valuable in the design process. A work plan has been created that includes a timeline and outlines the semester goals. Flexibility has been built in to this timeline to account for unforeseen obstacles, such as difficulty in clarifying current design procedures, but the completion of the design tool is anticipated by the end of the semester. The work plan includes testing of the tool throughout the project, to ensure reliability, and a final project report to review the work done. In order to achieve these goals, the design team has split into areas of technical expertise, including water systems, hydraulics, spreadsheet experience, Spanish, technical writing, and capital budgeting. With a well-conceived plan, an excited and intelligent team, and a wealth of resources, we feel confident that we can achieve the goal of a clear, documented tool for the design of water distribution systems in rural areas.

Introduction

In a world where 1.1 billion people lack access to safe sources of water and approximately 24 billion people have no access to adequate sanitation services1, a great need exists to help supply these people with basic necessities of life. Water for People (WFP) is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to helping developing communities obtain drinking water, sanitation and hygiene2. Teams of volunteers have already completed several water distribution systems in various locations worldwide. The teams documented the calculations they used to size the system, producing a series of spreadsheets containing their data and calculations. The teams also included maps of the community and water system in their documentation.

While this current documentation is useful to examine and interpret the data collected, improvements can be made. There is no standardized method for data analysis, hence spreadsheets and recommendations are often difficult to make. The procedure the team follows is often unclear, with values hard coded into the sheets without proper referencing. The sheets are hard to modify because of the un-referenced values, resulting in documentation that is not user-friendly.

Our goal is to create a series of spreadsheets that will serve as a standardized design tool for engineers working with Water for People and other non-governmental agencies. After the design tool is completed, only a set number of initial conditions specific to the community will need to be entered. All calculations will be performed automatically, with a set of maps generated depicting overviews of the system.

The following proposal will describe our project in greater detail. The objectives section will elaborate on the goals of this project. Anticipated benefits will illustrate how this design tool will assist engineers, WFP, community citizens and other interested parties. The background describes the motivation for this project. The work plan divides the project into smaller tasks to create the design tool, while team organization summarizes the specific tasks each team member will work on. The scheduling section defines the deadlines set to accomplish each task.

Objectives

The overall objective of the team is to create a series of spreadsheets that provide technical assistance for the design of public water systems in small, rural villages. The spreadsheets will be user-friendly, easily adaptable, and standardized, using information from past designs from Water For People. The final spreadsheet will allow engineers to save both time and money when designing new water systems.

Anticipated Benefits

With the success of the project, the team will create a highly flexible design tool that will benefit a variety of groups. This should make data evaluation easier and more efficient, producing thorough results. Water for People has provided data and spreadsheets that will be used as templates during design. Therefore, Water for People will gain an improved design tool that will meet their needs to optimize cost and labor. The design tool will be universal and available to all engineers working for organizations concerned with water supply in developing countries.

Members in communities receiving water systems will indirectly benefit from optimally designed systems. Engineers Without Frontiers will also benefit from the new design tool. As the new organization expands across the country, it will be imperative to enforce universal design methods so that chapters can work together. For the Cornell EWF chapter, the design tool will help students in the class develop engineering skills through implementing water projects in developing communities.

Background

Impoverished people in developing countries throughout the world often lack safe drinking water, basic healthcare, hygiene education, and sanitation facilities. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the combination of these conditions results in approximately 6,000 deaths everyday, mostly of children. In response, a dedicated handful of North American water professionals from the American Water Works Association established Water For People (WFP) in 1991 and Water For People-Canada in 1995. They saw this as a natural extension of what their 57,000 members already did on a daily basis - bring safe, sufficient drinking water to their own communities. WFP is an international, nonprofit, development organization committed to the long-term access to safe drinking water and improved sanitation and healthcare.

WFP helps impoverished people worldwide improve their quality of life by supporting locally sustainable drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene education projects2. WFP volunteers have already completed several water distribution systems in various locations, including communities in Guatemala. They documented their data and calculations used to design the system in spreadsheets, while not providing references as to the source of the data. In addition, equations used in the calculation procedures were either not provided or too embedded within the spreadsheet to decipher. Because examination of such a spreadsheet is so tedious and difficult, improvements can be made by the team to standardize calculation procedures and recommendations.

After examining the problems with current spreadsheets, the team saw a need to improve upon current spreadsheets used as design tools for rural water supply systems. Once the design tool is created, engineers will only need to enter a set of initial conditions specific to the community into the spreadsheet. After this data is entered, the calculations will be performed automatically in Microsoft Excel.

Work plan

The team upon assessment of the work completed thus far has developed a formal work plan, the resources available to our team at the current time, and the goals that we have set for the remainder of the semester. This plan begins with further evaluation of current spreadsheets, and continues with a decision to either modify current spreadsheets or to begin a new spreadsheet from scratch. The new or modified spreadsheets will be created, making use of input received from Water for People, village residents and engineers, as well as other experienced individuals. Throughout the creation process the team will also document work done, describing how to use the spreadsheet. Finally, testing of the spreadsheet will occur throughout the design process to ensure that its usefulness in various water supply design situations.

The following are the primary goals of the work plan:

1) Understand the current spreadsheets used in the design of water supply systems for rural communities.

This includes making understanding the sample spreadsheets that have been made available to the team by WFP, to determine modifications that need to be made.

2) Determine whether to modify current spreadsheets or design a new spreadsheet.

After assessing the usefulness of current spreadsheets, the team will decide whether to modify existing spreadsheets or to create a new series of spreadsheets in order to standardize design tools for water supply.

3) Create/modify the spreadsheet

The creation process will occur after making our decision to modify or begin a new spreadsheet. The design tool creation/modification process will take the most time, and will require input from various sources.

4) Testing the spreadsheet

Testing and creating/modifying the spreadsheet will occur simultaneously.

5) Communicate with other organizations

Throughout this process, the team will be communicating with representatives from the communities with whom WFP collaborates.

6) Documentation

The team will produce adequate documentation in expectation of an audience with various degrees of technical knowledge. Documentation includes an instruction booklet that will provide a detailed description of how to use the spreadsheet.

7) Predicting and overcoming challenges

A lot of discussion of possible challenges has occurred during the past eight weeks. Examples include a lack of sample spreadsheets as well as difficulty communicating with various organizations and contact people. These and other challenges will be met with an adaptive attitude, therefore it is possible that our work plan will change during the coming weeks. Modifications to the proposal and final report will be made accordingly, so that all goals are accomplished.

8) Creating the final report

At the end of the semester, the team will create a final report describing progress made on the spreadsheets. The team will also give recommendations to continuing and future students as to how to proceed with the project.

Team Organization

The project requires knowledge in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from engineering expertise to project and budget management. The group will form smaller groups that focus on specific aspects of the project. In order to maximize productivity and efficiency, the group matched each person’s strengths with necessary tasks. The groups are listed below.

1.  Water systems: A general understanding of the different components of rural water supply systems is needed to assign tasks and identify potential problems. Dr. Weber-Shirk will serve as a consultant in this area.

2.  Hydraulics: Basic knowledge of fluid mechanics and hydraulics is needed to understand the important parameters that go into designing water supply system. Group members that have taken fluid mechanics classes were chosen to start work in this area. As the semester goes on, members who are not included in this group will receive lectures on fluid mechanics and hydraulics and are therefore also expected to contribute in this area.

3.  Spreadsheet experience: Since the ultimate goal of our project is to create a design tool in the form of a spreadsheet, prior dexterity in Microsoft Excel is a must. James Berg, Dawn Sedorovich, Lindsay Ellis, Tracy Wise, Meaghan O’Neil, Amy Pickering, and Xinning Zhang will be working on this part of the project.

4.  Spanish: Most of the sample projects that the group has are partially written in Spanish. It is therefore important to know rudimentary Spanish to understand the designs and to be able to communicate with the local peoples and engineers. Dawn Sedorovich, Meaghan O’Neil, Leah de Riel and Luke Miller have some knowledge of Spanish and can be consulted for clarifications and translations.

5.  Capital budgeting: The success of our project also depends on proper planning and management of our budget. Leah de Riel, Luke Miller, and James Berg will work in this area.

6.  Technical Writing: Technical communication skills are need to document, edit, combine, and present the group’s work. Kelly Saikkonen, Leah de Riel, and Tracy Wise will serve as editors of writing produced by project members.

Resources and Needs

The team has access to many resources at Cornell, including immediate access to Cornell’s library, along with other university libraries through Inter-Library loan. Ongoing research conducted by faculty and students in various departments at Cornell constitutes another major resource. In addition, Dr. Monroe L. Weber-Shirk in the Civil Engineering Department is a source of expertise in water supply engineering. Finally, WFP has provided spreadsheets from previous projects for use. Information can also be obtained using connections with non-governmental organizations such as WFP.