Evaluation of Drums Filtration Units for Alternative Rural Water Sustainability

A drum sand filtration system is created as a sustainable drinking water treatment that provides safe potable water to rural communities. A filtration drum is assembled with different sand sizes, piping for the distribution of water and for the backwash sequences. The complete drum sand filter is combined with chlorine solution to assure the disinfection of water. The system have been developed to meet the goal of deliver sanitary water to small, rural, and remotely located communities that have no access to filtered and treated water and can be exposed to diseases related to contaminants and pathogens residing in surface water. The system is made with readily available materials in order for the system to be feasible. Three sand filtration drums combined with telemetry and instrumentation for remote monitoring are studied to monitor the quality of the water in a typical small community of Puerto Rico. The feasibility of the project will be completed by the monitoring of turbidity, specific conductivity, pH and dissolved oxygen at the surface water using a sonde, the monitoring of water quality at the effluents of the drums, measuring the disinfection rate and residual chlorine concentration in the drum sand filtration system and count of the microbial activity.