Water Transport Infrastructure

Group Members

Name	Student Id
Han Wei Chia	1002684
Hans Chia	0979848
Joost Roordink	1005406
Dennis Rizviç	1020540
Minjin Song	1194206
Thomas Gian	0995114

Subject

According to research, one in six people have no access to drinkable water. Even if they have a water source, it takes them hours of travelling long distances to reach it. This causes a harsh environment for humans to survive in. Current methods of transporting water require expensive infrastructure investments, which is often not affordable for areas where water access is limited (they often tend to be fairly poor). We want to see if robots replacing these is a viable option.

Objectives

Our objective investigate the viability of using a robot to replace the manual labor that millions of people need to do to have access to water, compared to other possible solutions to this problem.

Users

The main users are charities that help communities or even the communities themselves that have no convenient access to water in areas with a semi-arid or desert climate. We assume these areas can generate the amount of solar power needed to power the water transport robot for most of the day.

Approach

At first we will gather information on the currently existing possible solutions. Then we build a use case through answering questions such as: “What advantages does the robot have over the already existing solutions?”, “How will the logistics of ((bringing to village)) and maintaining the robots work?”. Based on the use case, we can state the technical requirements the robot should have in order to work. Based on the approximate costs of the requirements, we can compare it with other known solutions in terms of pricing. Finally, we will compare all solutions in all perspectives to conclude whether a robot is truly a viable alternative.

Milestones

• Summaries research papers
• USE Aspects
• Locating water research
• Water Transport research
• Water cleansing research
• Existing infrastructure research
• Realize water transport robot
• Incorporate water transport robot in infrastructure.

Deliverables

• Logbook
• Planning
• Final document (including code)
• Presentation
• Research paper of the infrastructure , With Advantages, disadvantages and cost comparisons.

Literature study

Summary of Literature's

Why does this problem need to be solved?

According to Graham et al, over 13 million women and 3 million children that are responsible for water collection in their household need to walk for more than 30 minutes. Note that these numbers are from only 24 countries in sub saharan africa, and the scale of the real problem is even larger than these numbers suggest. The paper also mentions various negative effects this has on these people. One of them is decreased hygiene. In the case of one particular disease(trachoma) has its prevalence almost doubled if water access is further away. Diarrhea also sees significant decreases if water collection time is reduced. Collection of water is also a physically demanding job. The negative effects of this are studied by Geere et al. in . They report that manual carrying of water results in a serious increase in spinal, neck and head pain. Children doing manual labour to fetch water has also been linked with decreased school performance. This is mostly linked to fatigue and lower attendance rates of children that need to carry water compared to those that don’t. Another major concern is the opportunity cost of the time women spend on getting water. Research done by Cairncross and Cuff that compared two villages with different access to water found that time saved by reducing travel times to water sources would be used on either other household tasks or used to spent more time with children. This is also backed by research done by Koolwal and Van de Walle, which finds that reduced travel times to water access improve children’s education rather than paid-market labour participation.

Water Access

Water Wells

Water wells have been used for ages in order to have access to groundwater as a source of water consumption. They are inexpensive and require little technology as it’s mainly manual labor in which every person can participate in. However, the costs and difficulty depend on the location of where the well is to be built. In areas where the groundwater level is deep in the ground and also what type of ground it is that provides stability of the surrounding earth will prove to be important factors.

cost of wells

The main advantage of wells is that there very cost effective ones there running, but the initial cost and the time required to make them can add up a lot.

The cost of a well being drilled can vary, depending largely on the depth of the well, the diameter of the hole and the materials needed for the job. Other factors can also affect the cost of the well, such as the quality of the pump, and all the other technology you want to attach to it, man hours needed for the job, transportation of materials and equipment.

Accurate information on drilling prices or costs in sub‐Saharan Africa is not easy to access. Systematic analysis is a challenge because there is poor, fragmented and non‐standardized record keeping of water supply projects and programmes in sub‐Saharan Africa as well as lack of transparency. Table 1 provides examples of estimated and actual borehole costs and prices, ranging from $2,000 to $500,000 ($120 to $1,271 per meter).

Disadvantages

Digging a well can be risky as you will usually be digging deep in the earth, which might collapse depending on the type of ground you work on. This requires technical overhead to avoid construction failures. And once you have a well, they aren’t well known for their hygienic reputation. Wells are easily contaminated and increase the chance of spreading various waterborne diseases such as cholera. Although there are ways of preventing the well of becoming contaminated, like sealing the well head, cleaning it with chlorine solutions and periodically checking it, these wells all require knowledgeable maintenance from the local community that makes use of these wells. They will have to be educated to protect the drinking water. But the cleanup of the well’s water is quite expensive and difficult as well, since they will require chemical, physical and biological treatments. The local community won’t have the knowledge on which treatments to apply and this will require an expert to perform throughout cleansing on every well. Knowing all the difficulties and costs that come along with using a well, It might not always be the best option.

Pipelines

Pipelines are mostly used for transporting different kinds of fluids, including petroleum, water, and natural gas. In this research, we will look deeper into how water transport, especially transport of drinking water, works and how much it costs.

Advantages

The advantages of using pipelines for water transportation are low maintenance costs, stable fluid transportation through difficult terrains, and low energy cost. Pipelines normally lasts for about 50 years and have low probability of leaks during the lifespan Pipelines are hidden underground, so there are no physical limitations once the pipelines are built. Compared to other transport methods, such as over ground vehicles, water pipelines are much more cost efficient since water is transported by a pump that requires little energy to operate.

Disadvantages

The main disadvantages of using pipeline for water transport is that it is difficult to find the source of leakage when it is known that the pipelines are broken. Although the probability of broken pipelines are low, the broken pipelines may take a long time to repair since it is buried underground. Also, the pipelines are inflexible in capacity once they are constructed since they have fixed pipe sizes that need to be compatible with other pipeline networks. The construction of pipelines are also limited to certain areas as they are buried underground and the constructors have to consider the environmental consequences of creating underground pipelines.

Cost analysis

According to the Trans Africa Pipeline that constructed the water pipelines across sub-Saharan region of Africa, the project that involves about 6,000 km of pipelines with pipe monitors, desalination plant, water tanks, and water pumps cost about 9.9 billion US dollars to construct and estimated cost about 380 million US dollars per year to maintain those pipelines.

There are two types of water that can be used to create drinking water: Surface water and groundwater. Surface water is open to the environment and therefore exposed to human and animal activity, which causes surface water to be contaminated. To create drinkable water from contaminated water, it needs to be treated, but treatment of contaminated water comes with extra costs. Also, surface water often has more salinity than drinkable water, which causes the water to be unsafe for consumption. To reduce the salt in surface water to drinkable levels, the water needs to be desalinated. The process of desalination costs $1/m3 for seawater and $0.60/m3 for brackish water. Groundwater is often a lot less salt, which causes the desalination costs to be a lot lower. In some cases desalination is not even needed, which means that the costs of desalination will be non-existent. For further treatment, groundwater needs nothing more than filtration of sand and other small particles, so in terms of cost groundwater is the far superior option compared to surface water.

Transport of water by pipelines costs around $0.05-0.06/m3 for every 100 kilometer of horizontal movement and has about the same price for a vertical lift of 100 meters. This means that transport of water by pipeline to areas that require more vertical lift are more expensive, than areas where only horizontal movement is needed.

Robot

Will a robot be accepted by the population in rural areas, that may not have any previous experience with robots?

The robot is intended to be used in areas where water access is a serious issue. These areas are often poor and have less access to technology in general. Therefore it might be an issue that the primary user group of these robots do not have any previous experience in encountering robots. One study that dealt with this issue is. In this study a remotely controlled robot was used to carry water in a rural village in India in order to observe the users reactions to this robot. The study reports that the robot was positively received by the population. It also noted that there seems to a strong cultural influence in what the robot was perceived to be, f.e. being seen as female despite it having a male voice. This means that the robot will need some degree of modularity in its appearance and interaction with users to adapt to any local customs that might affect its performance. It should be noted however that this study was carried out in India, so it can be disputed whether the results are applicable to rural areas in africa.

The advantages of having a robot as a solution

In the list below, we’ll consider three other possible methods of assuring water for a community of people and compare them with the robot. The three methods are: building a well, building a pipeline network and transporting water to the community through vehicles such as planes, boats or trucks/ cars.

• The robot is instantly deployable. Pipelines, wells etc need to be build and often takes a long amount of time, while a robot can be build beforehand and be deployed instantly to places where it’s needed. This is an advantage over pipelines and wells since they have a much longer construction time. The main contester on this point would be to have a vehicle transport water towards the community. While transportation with vehicles would be faster, it also requires more manpower and more money (traveling cost) the longer this form of transportation persists. A robot on the other hand has no other costs or need for manpower next to maintenance and build cost, which can be done beforehand and might thus be a better option regarding money and manpower.

• The robot is reusable. If a better means of transportation of water is deployed, the robot can be reused at a different location where it is needed. Being instantly deployable and reusable means that the robot can be moved and deployed quickly at another location. This is a great attribute in case the robot is used as a temporary form of providing water. When the robot is no longer needed in a certain area, it can simply be moved to another location which only requires traveling time and the traveling cost.

• Sustainability. A robot which is able to power itself by sunlight is mostly or fully (depending on how it’s made) self-sustainable excluding maintenance. This is also a characteristic of wells or pipelines, but overall it is a huge advantage over transporting water by conventional means towards a place.

Maintenance is the largest problem regarding the sustainability of the robot. Depending on how well the robot is build, the frequency of the maintenance would be increased or decreased. While maintenance is a problem with the robot, all structures, including the well and the pipeline, require some form of maintenance from time to time. Since the robot has not yet been fully built and tested, it is hard to give an estimate of the frequency of maintaining the robot and the time it takes to perform the maintenance and thus we can’t say if it would be more or less frequent or time-consuming than pipelines or wells.

• Automatic. Since the robot is automatic, just like a well or a pipeline, it helps people gather water and thus saving them time. A well and a pipeline can also fulfil this criterion if it is located relatively close to the community. Having the robot being fully automatic, the habitants of the area, will have more time which could possibly be spent on improving education or improving their settlement such as building better houses, creating a road, building a well or creating a pipeline network. It might be possible to let a person of that community do the maintenance depending on the complexity of the robot. If this would be possible, the sustainability of the robot would further improve.

• Deployability: the places it can be deployed. The robot has a couple of conditions to be deployed in a certain area. The first one would be strong long-lasting sunlight and the second would be that it’s able to traverse the area. While this is not an advantage, but more restrictions to the robot, it is possible that it would be the only viable option.

• • A pipeline without a pump requires there to be a decent foundation for the network and the starting position needs to be higher than the destination. If that’s not the cause, the pipeline would need a pomp which would consume energy based on the different in height.

• • For the construction of a well, there needs to be a large underground water source. Underground water is often salty to some degree and might thus not be drinkable water. The last problem with a well is the depth that the underground water source is located at. If the depth is too great, construction a well would be too difficult and thus not viable.

• • Transportation of water through boats, planes, trucks is close to always an option, the main problem with this form of transportation is that it’s time consuming, requires manpower and requires a lot of energy and thus money in the long-term. This method is more of a short-term method until they find something better and is most likely not viable in the long-term since the cost would increase each time you have to transport water.

In case all of the above methods are not viable, the robot might be the best idea to be deployed, if it satisfies the above-mentioned requirements.

From the list of advantages, we can conclude that the robot does have a few cases in which it outperforms the other methods. While the robot is not viable in every situation, it fulfils some niche cases in which the other methods are not optimal.