MoMo Project For Judicial And Efficient Water Management In Mongolia
Mongolia is a nation with extreme climatic conditions and diverse demographics. The whole of the desert country boils in the summer whereas the winter brings chilly cold conditions to the region. The humidity levels also change dramatically as we go from north to south. The arid nation has a huge area but out of the 3 million people, around 1 million of population is concentrated in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. In such adverse conditions, it becomes a tough task for the government to provide clean potable water to all its inhabitants on a regular basis. The biggest barrier in the water distribution is the infrastructural requirement for freeze-proof water pipes over an area of 1.5 million square kilometers. The economical water management is a critical issue in this part of the world. As a result, the nomads and the villagers use natural water resources like rivers or dig up wells for getting water. However, this method cannot fulfill the needs of the growing population. The summer rains that refill these wells and rivers have become irregular in the recent years. Also, due to the global warming and the shift in the seasons, the drizzles have been replaced by torrential downpours that do not soak much into the ground and quickly run off.
Dr. Buren Scharaw from the Fraunhofer Application Center System Technology AST in Ilmenau was born in Mongolia and he believes that for providing pure drinkable water to all the regions in this country, we need to consider a lot of parameters that are interdependent and interrelated. He, along with intellectual minds from the universities of Heidelberg and Kassel, the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research, Bauhaus University Weimar, the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries and various private-sector enterprises is working on a project for the water resource management and distribution since 2006. This project, popularly known as MoMo is acronym for “Integrated Water Resources Management for Central Asia: Model Region Mongolia”.
For this project, the area under observation is the city of Darkhan with 0.1 million residents and the catchment region of Kharaa river. Dr. Scharaw has made a lot of trips to Mongolia. He is involved in the quality assessment of the public and private well water, measurement of the energy efficiency of pumps and checking the sewage systems. All the data collected by him on these trips is input in the special computer models designed at Fraunhofer AST. The scientists have devised a new HydroDyn water management system that can analyze the quality as well as the quantity of various water resources. It is also capable of modeling next generation water resources that distribute the water in a better way while maintaining the purity of the drinking water. There are a lot of problems faced by the current resources like leakage, presence of bacteria in drinking water, energy wastage by the pumps, etc. Scharaw and his team have created a unique software program that can determine how the water can be supplied in an economically and ecologically stable way. The engineers have also come up with a measuring system that can locate any loss of water in the pipeline due to leakages. This technology is very simple. It makes use of tiny sensors that can detect a drop in the hydraulic pressure in the pipe. This enables the maintenance engineers to quickly locate the leakage spots with a high degree of precision. Once the anomalies are detected they can be immediately repaired. They are now working on developing new test sewage plant with a number of microbes. These can be used to detect the level of contamination in the water and increase the efficiency of sewage and drainage systems. The observations can then be used in a full scale plant. This project will take a couple of years to complete. Let us hope that this experiment brings relief to the Mongolian people who do not get even this basic commodity easily.
Image Credit: UniKassel
Dr. Buren Scharaw from the Fraunhofer Application Center System Technology AST in Ilmenau was born in Mongolia and he believes that for providing pure drinkable water to all the regions in this country, we need to consider a lot of parameters that are interdependent and interrelated. He, along with intellectual minds from the universities of Heidelberg and Kassel, the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research, Bauhaus University Weimar, the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries and various private-sector enterprises is working on a project for the water resource management and distribution since 2006. This project, popularly known as MoMo is acronym for “Integrated Water Resources Management for Central Asia: Model Region Mongolia”.
For this project, the area under observation is the city of Darkhan with 0.1 million residents and the catchment region of Kharaa river. Dr. Scharaw has made a lot of trips to Mongolia. He is involved in the quality assessment of the public and private well water, measurement of the energy efficiency of pumps and checking the sewage systems. All the data collected by him on these trips is input in the special computer models designed at Fraunhofer AST. The scientists have devised a new HydroDyn water management system that can analyze the quality as well as the quantity of various water resources. It is also capable of modeling next generation water resources that distribute the water in a better way while maintaining the purity of the drinking water. There are a lot of problems faced by the current resources like leakage, presence of bacteria in drinking water, energy wastage by the pumps, etc. Scharaw and his team have created a unique software program that can determine how the water can be supplied in an economically and ecologically stable way. The engineers have also come up with a measuring system that can locate any loss of water in the pipeline due to leakages. This technology is very simple. It makes use of tiny sensors that can detect a drop in the hydraulic pressure in the pipe. This enables the maintenance engineers to quickly locate the leakage spots with a high degree of precision. Once the anomalies are detected they can be immediately repaired. They are now working on developing new test sewage plant with a number of microbes. These can be used to detect the level of contamination in the water and increase the efficiency of sewage and drainage systems. The observations can then be used in a full scale plant. This project will take a couple of years to complete. Let us hope that this experiment brings relief to the Mongolian people who do not get even this basic commodity easily.
Image Credit: UniKassel
Comments
Post a Comment