Puerto Rico Hurricane Relief

The motivation behind this project is to address the issues faced by the citizens immediately following Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Through conversations with local stakeholders over the course of four months who experienced the hurricane firsthand, we learned that clean water was not available in the weeks following many hurricanes. Hospitals were not able to obtain clean water in a timely fashion, which led to consequent health-related problems. Roads were destroyed by the hurricane and the electrical grid that powered the water pumps was destroyed. Puerto Ricans had to travel miles in order to fetch clean potable water after Maria and even then, clean water was not a guarantee. This motivated us to  build a self-sustaining system that collects and stores rain-water. We worked with our local stakeholder, Plenitud, to implement a water harvesting system that provides electricity and potable water in the region of Las Marias, Puerto Rico. 

Implementation

Utilized optimization with the design constraints to develop solutions that minized cost to maximize electric & water supply.

In order to figure out what combination of variables would be best suited for the local community in Puerto Rico, the team implemented enumeration to develop all possible combinations. The total enumeration tradespace developed was a total 1,048,576 possible solutions.  From here the team identified two specific design criteria – cost and maintenance time.  Utilizing these two variables, the 1,048,576 various architectures were quickly optimized using Pareto’s front to provide a series of 8 unique combinations that could be matched to the local community’s demand of clean water and electricity.