I came up with this idea
about Rainwater Harvesting System last year. When my professor of Economic
Engineering assigned a resource paper about a cost-effective project which had
to be related with any topic of Engineering. That same semester I was taking
CEIE 340 Water Resource, my professor Dr. Ferreira seems to be a great
resources for ideas, so I decide to do my project about water. I started to
research different ideas and I read an article about cost-effective rainwater
harvesting system. I liked the idea of recycling water. The general idea of
rainwater harvesting is to collect the rainwater from the events that happen in
the wet seasons, so that water will not become run off, but recyclable water
that citizen would be able to reuse.
I wrote my paper and I
got excited about taking action in solving a huge problem as a scarcity of
water. Months later, a tropical storm hit El Salvador (my home country) causing
floods in many different areas of the country and also flooding mains streets
in San Salvador (Capital of El Salvador). Just three weeks after the tropical
storm passed El Salvador, I read in some Salvadorian news that some suburbs
were complaining about having no potable water for over 10 days. I realized
that all the rainwater of the tropical storm was wasted by no reusing it. Last
semester Dr. Maggioni mentioned the Oscar Program/Undergraduate
Research Scholars Program (URSP) and how students could spend more time
researching about their ideas. This program is an excellent opportunity for my
professional development as I am currently pursuing an Accelerated Masters in Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, with a concentration
in Environmental and Water Resources. Furthermore, Dr. Maggioni
became my mentor in this amazing opportunity to make rainwater harvesting
systems a possibility to implement in the USA and developing countries can
become one more step to solve water scarcity around the world.
On a weekly
basis I spend my time researching data from California and El Salvador. Last
week I finally finished to collect all the necessary data that I need to start
my designing phase. This week I learned that California’s rainfall is very
different that El Salvador’s rainfall, but both have some similarities in the
last 5 years. These next weeks I will be designing the different parts of the
rainwater harvesting systems such as roof catchments and cisterns. Each part
will be customized base on the collected data.
The expecting outcome is designing Rainwater harvesting system that can be
implement in residential houses and in commercial building that will be able of
satisfying the domestic water demand in areas with water scarcity in as
effective and affordable solution.
