Senior Design students build sustainable pump for use on Cambodian farms

In Cambodia, one of the poorest nations in Asia, farmers need a way to irrigate their fields during dry months, when the water table sinks to seven meters below the surface. A simple water pump could offer a solution, opening the way for a significant increase in the nation’s agricultural productivity and profitability. That pump would need to be inexpensive both to produce and to operate. More importantly, it would need to be sustainable.

“The farmers in the two provinces we work in now make between 43 and 54 cents a day,” said Paula Shirk, founder of the U.S. nonprofit Brooklyn Bridge to Cambodia (BB2C), which worked with students from MechSE to develop an affordable pump for rural farmers. “If the farmers buy these pumps…and they break down, those farmers won’t eat.”

Add to that challenge the requirements that the pump be highly portable and durable, easy to use in a wide range of environments, and simple enough that Cambodian farmers can set it up and fix it without tools or special training. All that, and local labor would need to be able to manufacture it with local materials and sell it for $50 or less.

That might sound like a tall order, but five University of Illinois undergraduates volunteered for the challenge as their senior design project in ME 470. From January to May 2012, Bryce Austell , Ian Berg, Anthony Cerqua, and Joe Colmone (all BSME ’12), along with Kenny Long (BS MatSE and MCB ’12), designed and assembled a prototype pump to fit the order. Long and Berg traveled to Cambodia in June 2012 to help local engineers build a prototype using local materials and test it in real-world conditions.

Cheap, reliable irrigation during the five-month dry period of the monsoon cycle would allow farmers to cultivate vegetables either for subsistence or to generate income. Not only would year-round agriculture create economic opportunity, it would allow for crop rotation, helping nourish the soil that constant rice production has depleted of nutrients.

A treadle-operated pump called The Super MoneyMaker, successfully used by the nonprofit KickStart in Africa, has shown promise in preliminary field tests BB2C conducted in Cambodia. Farmers were able to grow vegetables, including pumpkins, peppers, and marigolds, in the dry season, but also used pumps during the rainy season for household uses like providing water for laundry, bathing, and flushing toilets.

“For the rural poor to escape poverty, they must have access to water,” Shirk said. “And they must take a part in their own development.”

This last part is critical for BB2C, which sells the pumps instead of giving them away, so that the farmers see them as an investment. Unfortunately, imported from China at $125 each, the Super MoneyMaker is too costly for most Cambodian farmers. BB2C sells them for $95, absorbing the $30 difference, but that is an unsustainable model for the small nonprofit and even at that price most farmers cannot afford a pump. As a result, Shirk has been seeking help to develop a similarly effective pump that could be built for less than $25 in materials.

“BB2C identified the need for essentially a successful, low-cost, sustainably designed pump on their own, and then they realized that they didn’t have the expertise to do it,” Long said.

The New York-based non-profit reached out to several university chapters of another nonprofit, Engineers Without Borders (EWB), hoping to get the engineering support it needed. After talking to Long, then president of the Illinois EWB chapter, Shirk chose to work with students at Illinois, who she called “practical idealists.” Long helped get initial approval for the project from the student group’s advisory committee, but chose a different approach after talking further with Shirk.

“It became pretty apparent that [BB2C] wanted a pretty accelerated timeline,” Long said. “And it just didn’t really quite fit with the way that Engineers Without Borders works.”

Long was a Materials Science and Engineering major, but felt MechSE students would have the skills he needed, so he reached out to Emad Jassim, MechSE’s director of undergraduate programs, to begin the months-long process of adding the project into the Spring 2012 ME 470 course. Next, Long recruited a team of students who all agreed to work beyond graduation, if need be, to make the pump a success.

In designing their pump, the team aimed to meet or exceed performance characteristics advertised for KickStart’s Super MoneyMaker, but they declined having one sent to them so that it would not influence their own design. The team consulted with BB2C’s engineers in Cambodia to learn about locally available material and received additional advice from Wisconsin, Washington, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The final design called for a single-cylinder pump, an innovation which differs from the double-cylinder Super MoneyMaker and cuts down on materials, reducing both cost and weight.

“I told them, ‘Please try something different,’ and that’s what they did,” Shirk said. “And what they came up with weighs 10 times less and meets all the standards of the KickStart pump.”

By June, the team had built two prototypes; Berg and Long took the second one on an 8,670-mile trip to Cambodia to help BB2C’s in-country team build a version using local materials and field test it. Once there, the team encountered a few challenges, including some that required hard work, like lugging the pump up a spiral staircase or threading hoses over balconies, and others demanding “creative design work,” according to Berg’s account of the trip at www.apumpforcambodia.wordpress.com.

Some specialty parts were hard to find in Cambodia, but even items like PVC cross-pieces and metal rods, common in the U.S., were totally unavailable there. These complications created opportunities for the Illinois and Cambodian teams to learn from one another. Cambodian engineers taught Illinois engineers how to weld a bolt to the end of an unthreaded rod, while Long demonstrated to BB2C’s engineering staff how to use a die and handle to thread the other end.

“This kind of international exchange is what makes these projects so rewarding,” Berg wrote on the blog. “Taking an idea formed in Brooklyn, a staff of insightful, driven young men and women in Cambodia…engineers in Illinois…advice from Wisconsin, Washington, Australia, the UK, and several other places…and turning it into a workable solution to solve a very-real problem for Cambodian farmers.”

After a successful build and test in Cambodia, Berg and Long returned to Chicago in early July. Shirk reported a week later that Cambodian engineers had built two more prototypes and were preparing to begin long-term field testing of the system that she dubbed The RUDI Pump after her adoptive Cambodian son.

“Cambodia gave my son Rudi to me, the source of my joy,” Shirk said. “We now give The RUDI pump back to Cambodia, may it be a source of life.”