Date of Award
2016
First Advisor
Michael Bergman
Second Advisor
Monshin Paul Naamon
Third Advisor
John Myers
Abstract
Southeast Asian countries are suffering with naturally occurring arsenic groundwater contamination and millions of people in the region consume arsenic poisoned water. To appease this problem, many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been providing community scale arsenic water filters to many countries in Southeast Asia including Nepal, India and Bangladesh. However, because those filters are for large communities, many have to travel long distances to obtain water. In addition, the filters are extremely difficult to maintain; thus, when the filters go out of order, people use them as rice containers, benches, and other irrelevant utilizations. The filters that the NGOs have been distributing remove arsenic under the country specific safety standards, which are inferior to the World Health Organization (WHO)’s water safety standards. Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering (DHE) SafaPani, Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth’s Engineering Design Methodology and Project Initiation/Completion Team (ENGS 89/90) and VillageTech Solutions (VTS) are collaborating to create a cost-efficient and userfriendly arsenic water filter so that the filter would be easy to maintain and people would not have to travel long distances to get clean water. During the 2014-2015 academic year, the three teams were on the final stage on enhancing the previously designed prototypes and will begin distributing the filter in the near future.
Recommended Citation
Lee, Eldred, "Filtering Arsenic to Make a Difference in Southeast Asia: Prototype Optimization of SafaPani" (2016). Senior Theses. 1024.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/sr-theses/1024
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