2008 Woodie Awards
Students will design water pump for African village
Amber Pontius
Issue date: 11/16/07 Section: Campus
The Gwele Kona village in Mali, Africa needs an orphanage, but until there is a safe water source, one cannot be built. So five seniors in Miami University department of engineering have decided to take on that challenge.
Asha Ananthu, Meaghan Geist and Emily Yeager-all engineering management majors-along with Ryan Reinke and Chris Hopkins-both mechanical engineering majors-have adopted Gwele Kona's need for safe drinking water as their senior design project.
Ananthu, the project leader, was introduced to the project last year by Osama Ettouney, department chair for the department of mechanical and manufacturing engineering, as well as the academic adviser for the project.
Needing a senior design for her capstone, Ananthu realized that the project would be an amazing opportunity and set out to find other interested students.
"It seemed like a good opportunity to use everything we've learned up until this point in our engineering classes and be able to help in real life," Geist said.
According to the team, the people of Gwele Kona currently have to walk 10 miles to find sanitary water, with the area wells drying up in the summer.
Ananthu, Geist, Yeager, Reinke and Hopkins believe that their water pump could help thousands of people in the Gwele Kona village as well as the surrounding regions.
The team said that the scope of the project is a lot larger than what any of them had thought it would be. Besides researching, designing and constructing the water pump system, they are also working on making an instructional manual that that will have to be translated first into French, then into the native language of the people in the village.
Not only are the students working with a language barrier but they have never seen the village where their water pump will be placed. They said that this is one of the biggest problems they face. They have been shown pictures and been told about Gwele Kona, but they have no personal experience with the area.
Asha Ananthu, Meaghan Geist and Emily Yeager-all engineering management majors-along with Ryan Reinke and Chris Hopkins-both mechanical engineering majors-have adopted Gwele Kona's need for safe drinking water as their senior design project.
Ananthu, the project leader, was introduced to the project last year by Osama Ettouney, department chair for the department of mechanical and manufacturing engineering, as well as the academic adviser for the project.
Needing a senior design for her capstone, Ananthu realized that the project would be an amazing opportunity and set out to find other interested students.
"It seemed like a good opportunity to use everything we've learned up until this point in our engineering classes and be able to help in real life," Geist said.
According to the team, the people of Gwele Kona currently have to walk 10 miles to find sanitary water, with the area wells drying up in the summer.
Ananthu, Geist, Yeager, Reinke and Hopkins believe that their water pump could help thousands of people in the Gwele Kona village as well as the surrounding regions.
The team said that the scope of the project is a lot larger than what any of them had thought it would be. Besides researching, designing and constructing the water pump system, they are also working on making an instructional manual that that will have to be translated first into French, then into the native language of the people in the village.
Not only are the students working with a language barrier but they have never seen the village where their water pump will be placed. They said that this is one of the biggest problems they face. They have been shown pictures and been told about Gwele Kona, but they have no personal experience with the area.
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