New Hope Engineering Student Working To Bring Clean Water To African Hospital

NEW HOPE, PA — A New Hope engineering student at Cedarville University is helping to bring clean water to a Zimbabwe Hospital in southeast Africa

Reliable clean water is essential at Karanda Mission Hospital in Zimbabwe, where Matthew Shiel and the engineering team at Cedarville are designing a water treatment system for drinking water and sterile surgical use.

Matthew Shiel of New Hope, Lauren Kolodsick of Lake Orion, Michigan, and Caleb Weaver of Hudsonville, Michigan, are developing the system as part of their senior civil engineering design project.

Located in a rural region of Zimbabwe, Karanda Mission Hospital serves approximately 75,000 patients annually and performs nearly 4,000 surgeries, making reliable access to clean water essential for those who live on the hospital's compound and for patient care. The hospital sources its water from a nearby river, where an existing system treats the water using a multi-barrier method. But during Zimbabwe's rainy season, increased runoff kicks up sediment, filling the water with higher amounts of suspended sand and silt.

"The problem we are trying to solve comes from having dry and wet seasons in Zimbabwe," said Kolodsick. "During the rainy season, the downstream filters quickly clog due to excessive sediment and particles in the water. Our solution seeks to lower the turbidity of the water before it reaches the plant so that it isn't overwhelming the hospital's existing system."

The Cedarville senior design team designed and built a plexiglass prototype using angled plates to test their ideas, gather data, inform their conclusions and lead to defendable claims. (Photo by Lauren Kolodsick)

Shiel, Kolodsick and Weaver joined an ongoing partnership with Karanda Mission Hospital that began several years ago. A previous team of Cedarville civil engineering students designed and built sand filters to enhance the hospital's water treatment system. While still effective, the existing filters require intensive maintenance during the rainy season.

"The sand filters are supposed to be cleaned and backwashed every three days," said Shiel. "But when the turbidity is really bad, they must clean the filters three times a day. So the system functions, but not as well as it could."

Each civil engineering senior design team has six people, but Shiel, Kolodsick and Weaver's team chose to narrow their focus. They worked on creating the water pretreatment system while their other three teammates, Shannon McKay from Floyds Knobs, Indiana, Ian Bellinger from Alger, Michigan, and Jeremiah Payne from Visalia, California, handled the chemical treatment of the water.

After extensive research and design work during the fall semester, the team built a plexiglass prototype to test its ideas and refine the treatment system. Their design uses gravity to settle the sand particles out of the water, an energy-efficient solution well-suited to Zimbabwe's unreliable power grid.

"We built a 'clarifier' to remove the larger sand particles before it reaches the pumps," said Kolodsick. "We used angled plates so that the water is shot up diagonally, shortening the distance the sand particles need to drop out and settling many of the particles from the water."

The team hopes to finalize its design so members can travel to Zimbabwe over the summer to help build and install the filtration system.

Karanda Mission Hospital in Zimbabwe has an existing water treatment system in place designed, built and improved by a previous Cedarville University civil engineering senior design teams. (Photo by Lauren Kolodsick)