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Projects & Opportunities

Better Bearings Field Study
☆ Summer 2019 field study to test out the power of Better Bearings.
While many efforts have been and continue to be made to provide clean water across the globe, many sources of surface water are contaminated with animal and human waste as well as pesticides and chemicals.
Approximately 184 million people living in Africa depend on hand pumps for their daily water supply (MacArthur, 2015) with an estimated 50,000 new hand pumps shipped to Africa each year (Sansom and Koestler, 2009).
Despite efforts to improve rural water service delivery, hand pumps serving rural communities often fall into disrepair. According to data compiled by Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) ((RWSN), 2009) from 20 African nations covering 345,071 wells in 2009, 36% of hand pumps are non-operational. This results in a loss of capital investment in infrastructure and a negative impact on rural communities.
When a community hand pump breaks down, families are forced to find alternative water sources. Alternative sources may include carrying water a greater distance from a hand pump in a neighboring community, or less protected sources such as hand dug scoops or surface water.
Handle bearings in the commonly deployed India Mark II hand pump have been found to frequently fail, often in less than one year. Hand pumps in remote locations have often been abandoned for months or possibly more than a year due to the difficulty in obtaining repair services.
The Better Bearings product was developed by Tony Beers in consultation with World Vision during his tenure at The Collaboratory at Messiah College. Tony’s work on the product indicated that Better Bearings could extend the mean time between failures (MTBF) of bearings on India Mark II hand pumps from 9 months to 3 years or more.
A side-by-side live study of factory shipped bearings vs. Better Bearings will begin in the summer of 2019 in an effort to quantify the improvement offered by Better Bearings. This study will take place in Burkina Faso and in Zambia, Africa.
Would you like to learn more? Or to place an order? Use the contact form to contact one of our Better Bearings team members.
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Hybrid Thermal Lance
☆ Burning unexploded mines and saving lives.
Anti-personnel mines, anti-vehicle mines, IEDs, and unexploded ordnance (UXO) continue to account for numerous deaths and disabling injuries around the world. A majority of the victims are civilians, including children.
Ordnance disposal specialists have used a variety of techniques for destroying and disposing of such devices. One innovative method has been developed by Dr. Don Pratt of Messiah College in partnership with the HALO trust which uses deflagration to burn up the explosive material in the mine without detonating it. The “Hybrid Thermal Lance” uses the reaction between pure oxygen and an acrylic tube to create an intensely hot, but well focused flame, to burn through the casing of mines and consume the explosive material therein. Another benefit of this approach is the ability to safely transport all of the HTL’s components via standard commercial methods, including air travel.
Don Pratt leads a group of students at Messiah College’s Collaboratory to demonstrate, refine and test the HTL. Several prototypes have been demonstrated in Afghanistan and Georgia. Engineering development continues on refinements requested by HALO such as an electronic valve, a countdown timer, and simpler operation.
Don Pratt approached AW to investigate the feasibility of making HTL commercially available to NGOs and other organizations involved in the eradication of land mines, IED, and other UXO.
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Better Bearings
☆ Extending the life of India Mark II pumps by 300% for rural Africa.
Approximately 184 million people living in Africa depend on hand pumps for their daily water supply (MacArthur, 2015) with an estimated 50,000 new hand pumps shipped to Africa each year (Sansom and Koestler, 2009).
Despite efforts to improve rural water service delivery, hand pumps serving rural communities often fall into disrepair. According to data compiled by Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) (RWSN, 2009) from 20 African nations covering 345,071 wells in 2009, 36% of hand pumps are non-operational. This results in a loss of capital investment in infrastructure and a negative impact on rural communities. When a community hand pump breaks down, families are forced to find alternative water sources. Alternative sources may include carrying water a greater distance from a hand pump in a neighboring community, or less protected sources such as hand dug scoops or surface water.
The BetterBearings product was developed by Tony Beers in consultation with World Vision during his tenure at The Collaboratory at Messiah College. Tony’s work on the product indicated that BetterBearings could extend the mean time between failures (MTBF) of bearings on India Mark II hand pumps from 9 months to 3 years or more.
With millions of India Mark II pump currently installed worldwide, a substantial market for longer-life replacement bearings may exist.
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The Intelligent Water Project
☆ Increasing hand pump reliability
through cloud based web applications.
Millions of people living in rural Africa obtain their daily water supply from hand pumps, yet many hand pumps fail and remain non-functional. RWSN reports that in Africa as many as 36% of hand pumps are non-functional (Hand Pump Data, 2009).
Most current monitoring and evaluation practices rely on someone visiting and visually inspecting hand pumps. This can be logistically challenging and therefore especially costly for remote pumps. Since costs must be shouldered by the community and/or sponsoring NGO or GO, inspections are often initiated only when a community self-reports a pump failure. Sometimes communities do not report if there is concern in the community that they may have caused the failure. Inspection visits, whether initiated by the community or periodically scheduled, are expensive and give infrequent data. As a result, lengthy downtimes for hand pumps are too frequent.
Hand pump downtime affects entire communities, but women and girls are often tasked with procuring water from alternate sources, which often requires them to walk longer distances and experience longer queues, resulting in reduced daily productivity or school attendance. The alternative water sources can be unimproved and unprotected water sources which can lead to heightened safety and health risks. While the cost of keeping hand pumps working often exceeds available resources, the long term costs to the health and well-being of people and to local economics of hand pump failure can be even greater.
The Intelligent Water Project (IWP) automatically measures and reports the health of hand pumps and the volume of water extracted. IWP is configurable to also report groundwater levels. Sensor data is processed and uploaded daily to a secure data base in the cloud by IPW hardware and software. Cloud-based web applications enable further analysis and data distribution to stakeholders via customizable reports and alerts, including text message alerts of degrading pump conditions or failure. A key goal is to support field management processes that dramatically increase the reliability of hand pumps and decrease the cost of ownership . A secondary goal is the collection of hand pump data from all IWP enabled pump sources to provide a rich resource of data that enables WASH practitioners, managers, hydrologist and donors to make informed decisions.

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Messenger, AlignedWorks
Communication within our Venture Talent community is essential to a vibrant experience. Keeping our members informed, engaged and energized is a an endeavor that takes many forms, including email blasts, videos, our web site, social media, and more.
If you enjoy motivating and informing others, can’t help but being creative and full of ideas, this could be the spot for you. For those of you who would like to expand your repertoire and try your hand at creative writing, video production, social media, and any other type of communications vehicle, we would welcome a conversation.
Interested in learning more? Use our Contact Form to send us a message, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
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Meetup Wrangler, AlignedWorks
Periodically, AlignedWorks hosts a Meetup, where members can meet with one another, get informed and share ideas. These meetups occur in a physical location, but we also offer remote access for geographically dispersed participants.
So what are Meetup Wranglers? They typically enjoy both communications and logistics. They work with our Core Team to develop an agenda, presentations and interactive opportunities for our members. They also wrangle the logistics, such as email blasts advertising Meetups, venue details, working to coordinate AV and remote access, and plenty more.
Our Communcations Team currently has two talented Meetup Wranglers, but their seasonal home business sometimes makes them unavailable, and the addition of another Wrangler would be a tremendous help.
Interested in learning more? Use our Contact Form to send us a message, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
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Web Curator, AlignedWorks
What is a Web Curator? It’s someone who obsesses about our website! Our curator will tune the look and feel of the AlignedWorks website, and most importantly, work with our members to get their “communication” ideas realized as web pages.
We currently host on wordpress.com, so some familiarity with Workpress is a plus, but not an absolute requirement. If you have some prior experience with web hosting and maintenance, WordPress is an easy platform to learn. Some basic skills in cropping, sizing images is also helpful.
Should you be interested in learning more about this opportunity, please use our Contact Form to send us a message, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
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Packaging and Shipping, Better Bearings
Safely shipping product and prototypes around the world requires robust but light packaging. Those of us who have tried to find some extra room in our luggage for a prototype destined for the other side of the globe have developed a new-found appreciation for packaging and shipping.
Project teams such as Better Bearings are looking for help in designing, evaluating, testing and sourcing packaging for both storage and shipping of their products.
Join a project team as a regular member or operate as a specialist across multiple projects. Either way, you could be a great contributor!
Interested in learning more? Use our Contact Form to send us a message, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
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Business Development, Better Bearings
Put your business skills and experience to work by joining the Better Bearings Project team and help the team develop a market for their worthy product.
We could use help in performing cost analysis, market analysis, and developing international sales channels, etc.
The Better Bearings Team is currently at work staging pilot runs and tests in two African countries, so this is still pretty ground floor.
Interested in learning more? Use our Contact Form to send us a message, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
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Tech Braniac, AlignedWorks
If you think AlignedWorks is an out-of-the-box venture, think about the tech platform to support it! This is the ground floor and we have a number of talented programmers who are evaluating technologies and approaches to building our platform.
Our team would like to welcome several more programmers who can help us focus on system design, architecture, cloud, and CI/CD prior to implementation. If you like to research and evaluate, this could be right up your alley. Once the platform environment is finalized, front end, back end, DB, experience will be very useful.
All of our programmers have full-time day jobs, and they collaborate on our platform design in their off-hours. This could be a great way to try out the “start-up” experience while keeping your day job.
Interested in learning more? Use our Contact Form to send us a message, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
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