Executive Summary

Every year, over 7,000 students across the UK, Ireland, Australia and in recent years, USA and South Africa embark on a design challenge from Engineering Without Borders. This year, The EWB challenge was to design and create an outcome to better or improve the lives of the residents of Piedritas & Lobitos in Peru. Piedritas & Lobitos are small towns located in the North-Western border of Peru. The communities have a combined population of 1,700 residents which include; Fisherman, Tourists, Oil extractors, Surfers and many more. Both towns are parted by a city, Talara, the source for many essentials such as Water, electricity and other supplies but in turn the main entry point for tourists who are a valuable contribution to the ecosystem in Peru. Tourists make up 30% of the population in Lobitos in which 14% of residents live in Poverty. However, in Piedritas, 75% of the entire population live in poverty due to a rise in unemployment and services including, clean, piped drinking water.

The task presented 8 areas in which we can investigate with a look to improve the lifestyle in Lobitos or Piedritas.

After examination of all 8 areas, a topic which stood out and drew our attention was the water section. The

residents water supply is very unreliable. The supply can be down for 2/3 hours per day, for 3 days of the

week. In Addition to this, the piped water cannot be drunk and must be boiled first to ensure personal safety. This requires more energy that some do not have the financial capacity for. Other residents’ resort to filling clear bottles of water and leaving them on rooves to bake. However, this may take hours or even days to ensure the water is safe to consume. The only other option is to buy bottled water but the high prices, paired with the rise in poverty has made this a luxury most residents cannot afford. With a demand for access to free, sanitised water, we created our solution -UVH2GO.

UVH2GO is a water filtration and sterilization unit optimized for the locations within Lobitos & Piedritas using a majority of resources they have an abundance of. The product utilizes the Ultraviolet-Light and scorching temperatures from the sun’s rays to sterilize the water. Why spend hours or days waiting for your water to bake in the heat on the sun when the process could be carried out in 45 minutes to an hour? The reflective parabolic dish directs the suns rays to heat a heating sphere at the focal point where it can reach temperatures of over 60 degrees Celsius which reduces the 8 hour baking time to under an hour. But before the water flows through the system, it passes through a Natural mechanical filter, which aids in removing sediment and particulates, resulting in sources such as sea-water can be sterilized and filtered to a point where it is safe for consumption. That is free water, filtered and sterilized for all to drink, cook with, shower with, etc. This is a community centred product, designed to ensure all residents of Piedritas & Lobitos have access to safe water, a commodity many people around the world take for granted. All that is required is users bring the amount of water they intend to withdraw from the system. This creates a cycle where the users replenish the water they withdraw. The system requires a moderator which will ensure the valve is turned on/off at the correct times, the system is functioning along with the need for maintenance which will bring employment for a few residents and with potential for expansion, the unemployment rate will reduce. In Peru… (EWB 2021)

And In towns such as such as Lobitos and Piedritas, the situations are even worse. (Ecoswell 2021)

Design Process

Having been assigned the brief, it became important to study the area of Lobitos & Piedritas to fully understand which of the challenge areas where most in need for development. The basis of the initial research spanned through the demographics of both towns, local geography, the weather along with the seasons. From the start it, it became very clear that water and the issues surrounding was affecting the towns populations severely. More specifically the lack of clean water and sanitation accompanied by the unreliable current supply.

Water is a necessity for a human to maintain a healthy lifestyle. In many countries including our society, it allows us to carry out a range of tasks overlooked by many as a given. Such as, taking daily showers, cooking, instant access to tapped drinking water among many others. Said day-to-day tasks allow us to function normally. In Lobitos & Piedritas this is not the case, here clean water is very scarce due to being located within a hyper-arid zone. This is where the relation between precipitation and evotranspiration is less than 0.05. As on onset from this, both towns suffer severe problems due to the supply and sanitation of water. What water they do receive is supplied from the river Chira among other towns and rural communities such as Mancora. In total, 1.1 million people are reliant on this source across 24 towns alongside the use in agriculture, oil and gas refineries, a fish farm and other industrial activity.

Figure 1 – A map of North Peru with an expansion identifying the L&P location

Potable water is piped 70km into Lobitos & Piedritas for domestic, local industrial and economic needs. This water passes through and is treated at the potable water treatment plant in Paita, close to the river before being piped to Talara city and onto Lobitos and Piedritas. This unfortunately does not stop locals from illegally tapping into the network. Along with this the supply itself is very unreliable and residents can be made to go without water for 2/3 hours a day for 3 days of the week. In turn people often use other water sources such as Artisanal wells, a process of tapping into underground stores of water accompanied by the use of natural pressure to bring the water to the surface, only one in the area is currently functioning to some capacity.

Figure 2 – An Artisanal Well, image demonstrates function

Another main issue both the local area and country suffer with is that places are built and not maintained. A key example of this is the abandoned desalination plant from the 1960’s which still lies in ruins. Left remaining is the pumps and spherical tank used to store the water supplied from Talara. Only when the water levels reach high enough, operators from the EPS Grau manually open the valve providing water to certain areas of Lobitos one at a time. This is carried out through an operator travelling manually to each location on a motorbike and

Figure 3 – a photo of an operator showing the condition opening an individual valve for a period of time, of the pipeline usually taking a couple of days ensuring the tank maintains a certain required level of pressure. Problems specific to this method are that areas all receive similar amounts of water with no accommodation to population comparison. Areas such as Barrio Centro receive the same water roughly as Nuevo Lobitos despite the much smaller population.

Figure 4 – A spherical water tank in Lobitos

For more financially able residents, there is an opportunity to purchase large tanks that can be placed on rooves of homes, with some also installing pumps to transfer the water into them. Those who cannot afford the luxury are limited to what little water they can fill into buckets when available. If the supply is damaged e.g., Natural disasters, residents have been left to go 2/3 months surviving of small amounts of bought bottled water at a very high price.

Through the research and design process, the team aimed to combat some of the major problem’s residents suffer from on a daily basis. Water cannot be consumed from the tap; it must be boiled first. This has been proven to be more necessary than ever after the introduction of water testing kits which found the presence of harmful bacteria such as coliform which if ingested by humans will cause many of the common illnesses such as sickness and diarrhoea. Further testing has also proven that shallow groundwater available is contaminated with high concentrates of chlorides, sulphates and some metals that are all above the level fit for human consumption. These presences have caused particular issues within the medical industry where any water used must be clean and sterile to prevent infection and protect those already vulnerable to disease with the only current viable source being very expensive bottled water.

Potential Solutions

Residents of Lobitos and Piedritas often don’t have access to clean sanitized water due to problems with the pipe system itself paired with the unclean infected water supply which has to be boiled first. The design team investigated many different methods to do this such as; boiling, distillation, solar purification, clay vessel filtration, reverse osmosis iodine addition and water chlorination.

Through the research the design team came to the conclusion that a possible solution could be that of solar purification. The solar energy/radiation is in an abundance in this region and is almost constant excluding night time. This method can be used as an efficient way for the residents to sanitize water and purify it from the biological contaminants within. This method is currently practiced on a small scale basis, by filling up clear plastic water bottles and placing them on a heat absorbing surface such as a roof. To do this on a larger scale, the design team set about designing a product in which all materials are either pre-existing and reached the end of its life for the initial intended use or can be sourced within the local area. This was sone with the aim to decrease the environmental and economic impact that sourcing new, raw materials from this region of the world would cause, especially given the lack of supplies.

Figure 5 – am image of Small-Scale Solar Sterilisation by plastic water bottles

One of the main considered design options the team considered was inspired from the Parabolic dish experiment explained in the Accredited work segment of the report. The experiment reached temperatures of over 100 degrees Celsius which is leaps over the required 60.

Figure 6 – A sketch design of the parabolic Sterilisation unit

Figure 7 – A sketch design experimenting different iterations of Figure 6 such as parabola shape

Another solution the design team investigated was the use of a straight boiling element to disinfect the water. This was considered due to the already common practice of boiling water to sterilise in both towns. This design functioned by heating water to evaporation, condensation and deposition of the water into a sterile container through the use of a closed system of tubing. This process efficiently kills biological pathogens but also separates fresh water from the high levels of salt present, in turn a device which makes groundwater safe to drink.

Figure 8 – A sketch design of the evaporation sterilisation unit.