Projects

Aral Region Water Filtration

In late March, I joined a team of local environmental engineers and organizers on a project to support access to clean water in the Aral Region of western Uzbekistan.

Overview

The following table describes the activities conducted at each of the 4 schools we visited:

School Site

Lessons

Student Projects

Water Survey

Filter Installation

Kegeyli 12-mektep

✔

✔

✔

✔

Kegeyli 41-mektep

✔

✔

✔

Muynoq 1-mektep

✔

(Previously installed)

Qonliqol 7-mektep

✔

✔

In total, we worked with 131 students across 4 schools and provided clean drinking water to over 2,500 members of the schools’ respective communities.

Filter Installation

Left: Installed filter room, Middle: Dirty pumped water, Right: Purified Water

Two filters were procured for installation. The first, larger one was a Volardda HLD RO-0.5T/H. The 3-tank reverse osmosis system has a capacity of filtering 500 liters per hour with a desalination rate of 95%. After installation, we recorded .05 mg/liter of salt in the purified water, a 96% reduction.

The larger filter was initially set to be installed in the relatively small Mekteb-12. After learning of a larger school in need in Qanliqol, we elected to purchase a second filter in spite of it not being initially budgeted. To meet the needs of the hundred school students and their families, we selected an Aquavit Prime Lite RO with a capacity of 100 liters per hour. The larger challenge for the second filter was digging a borehole and connecting a pump to pipe the water to the filter inside. We drilled the borehole to a depth of 23 meters.