March 17: Two scales in the project planning

This Monday in Design Factory I(Sasha) have  found Konrad, Axel and Sakari. A day before we got letters from Aino and Nassib, so we have had new data to talk about. Absolutely fantastic amount of water needed for trees (80L/day/tree) was mentioned in a letter, and we took off talking of this one and not being able to match this number (for the reference, 1500 trees were planted recently on the Rock Village perimeter) needed for irrigation and permanent desire of planners to engage in using gray water (drain from household use) for irrigation. With the average consumption of 150L per day per capita (taken from the previous Aalto reports on situation on Lebanon), this will make very little sense. Later Maria El-Solh discredited 80L/day requirement, when asked via email. She claimed that currently the trees are fed by the rain and later will have to be irrigated twice a week during the summer. We still will be waiting to receive correct information on this. 

 

Initial shock led us to a very interesting twist in our objectives. Previously we were looking into the small scale solutions orienting on the Phase 1 of development. Now this case gave us a new angle of vision. Phase-1-Living-sattlement is actually small, however Phase-1-Farming can be already quite significant. Therefore since now we have decided to treat them separately and have a reasonably simple take on the living matters, while considering potential crop farming in a larger scale. 

We keep popularization of sustainable practices as a target desired by the client. From here and restrictions above topics we are looking into this week are as follows.

LIVING Phase 1

(objective: simple and cheap solutions that may seem attractive to other farmers)

Energy solution will, most likely, be a typical generator, what we would like to look into now, is whether it makes sense to install few solar panels on the building rooftops (Konrad). Current prices and technologies might make is quite possible and the benefit of those will be easy to convey to the neighbors.

Bio-gas mini-plant is a feasible suggestion (Sakari) and we will elaborate on numbers that it involve. At the moment the key questions here are: what kinds of cattle/farm-animals are there going to be, in which amounts and in which conditions. It makes big difference for the future of the plant whether there is one sheep or three, whether they are free-roaming in the field or kept indoors. For example, in case where animals spend day time roaming in the filed, overall productivity of the plant drops by 50%, which might make keeping it not any beneficial for the household.

Suggestion on personnel recruitment in the Rock Village development can be drawn at this moment (Sasha). For example, productivity of our work could have been a lot higher if we could communicate to a professional working with technical questions. It does not have to be a person working for the project full time, but someone aware enough of the case and having dedicated time to feed us with data.  Quite many things become literally impossible in our work due to the lack of information on the case.

AGRICULTURE AND FARMING Phase 1

(objective: high yields, high quality product)

Obtaining independence on water resource is still a big topic, therefore we keep looking into options. We received a call saying that considering both rainwater collection and groundwater use is the optimal case. Suggestions for both will largely depend on the scale, now we will present everything we have in an upcoming mid-report (Vesa).  To draw the assumptions on energy required for pumping the water we need to know where the water is pumped from, where does it go to and what are the heights characteristics of the landscape. 

Estimates of required irrigation need for various crops can be done by Axel and Konrad as well. They will go for using UN FAO data and other similar resources available online to make plan on the book values. 

March 10: Promising Findings and Elaborating on it.

We were dearly missing Vesa and Konrad on March 10th meeting, other than this had a board full of notes again.  In a planning curve after few talks with Nassib and a few turns of discussion we set a new objective that might sound like:

Provide technical guidelines for the Phase 1 of Rock Village construction with 1 family inhabiting the area. Final aim is an involving way to present concepts of eco-conscious and sustainable farming on the exemplary case of 1 family farming.  

With these two objectives on our mind we set following directions for the result:

1. Smallest possible biogas plant

Sakari has managed  to find an example from 2002, where Indian family has nearly managed to cover the cooking gas production utilizing bio waste from their cattle. Six chicken and one pig have produced just enough manure (aka "animal poop") to feed 610L gas plant reactor (daily need for water input 11L). Resulting with 0,699 m3/day of gas used in the kitchen (with a daily need about 0,850 m3 - Not too bad!). 1L of water takes about 0,04m3 of gas to boil, for example. 

In fact, using anaerobic digester plant for direct gas production is not the most efficient way of utilizing it's capacity. More reasonable solutions come with use of the plant to generate energy and heat. However in the small-scale case the input of the manure might be not enough to sustain the energy level. When does it become efficient? This is one of the questions we will look into. Sakari promised to produce an Exel with the book-values on animal manure production that can calculate how many animals and of which kind would produce enough material for the plant to grow. 

Requirements to begin with seem pretty basic: container for manure, container for the gas, a little batch of other equipment and water added regularly. However there are specific conditions that the plant would need, such as permanent temperature about 30-40C. Given set up of 6 chicken and 1 pig was enough to keep the plant running which keeps us optimistic about the possibility to suggest it for the Phase 1 area development. Some agriculture waste can as well be used to run the plant, but this input has its limits and will not be the main one. Number of productivity vary a lot in real life and can not be fully predicted mathematically. 

To run the digester plant you need a special sort of seed sludge (anaerobic bacteria). There is a functioning reactor in Beirut and getting in touch with them Rock Village may acquire a scoop of the material sufficient for the stage 1 little container. 

2. Use of grey water in irrigation

Nassib has mentioned this topic as particularly desired one. Ville will look into the filtering techniques used in Finland, as they seem to function pretty well. Vesa should take a look into small scale grey water irrigation solutions. 

The very basic idea of the grey water reuse system is a basin connected to the kitchen drain and collecting the dumped water. 

3. Solar panels

It was made clear to us that self-sustaining is not the aim of the project. What matters is to provide a spectrum of techniques and concepts that could illustrate local farmers the opportunity of running households in the way not harmful for environment. As solar panels are getting cheaper we thought that Konrad and Axel may take a look into the small scale solutions in this field. Quite possibly we can find a lot of data in previous Aalto studies on this account, but the situation in this field is changing so fast, that more relevant studies could have been made. 

Nassib explained that since the area is still under the stress of uneasy political tension any big energy plant is seen as a potential problem. Solution we propose should be more on the household level. 

WORK SCHEDULE

for tasks outlined above

17.03 — studies on the small scale functionality should be presented to the group on the next meeting

24.03 — before this group meeting we should forward our mid-way report to Nassib to check if we are on the right way and hear more insight in response. Feedback would be good to get before 28.04 so we can react fast enough before the review we have in the class.

31.03 —Mid-review in the class.

Meeting 5.3.2014, Requirements of Rock Village project phase 1.

 

The spring is coming to Finland! And it’s time to get our project really going on! Today the meeting took place in Design Factory as usual at the reasonable time of 11 am.  Sadly Sakari and Konrad couldn’t make it, but in my point of view the meeting was fruitful.  Sasha told us about his Skype conversation with Nassib which revealed others the lack of funding in the Rock Village project and the fact that nothing much has really been done yet.

This in mind we decided that we’ve done enough planning and that it is time for good old fashioned research work. Our main objective is to start the designing from the very beginning: the one family moving in and living in the Rock Village site. For this we listed the basic requirements for one family living and cultivating land. In this very early stage we would use the most simple and easiest solutions available. For example for energy supply we thought of a generator and for water supply a big tanker. These solutions could easily be later replaced by more sustainable solutions ( for example a well and small scale solar energy) Now it is important to get people living in the village site and start implementing the project in practice! This also helps with the funding since all the investments are not made in a single batch. 

In order to get the phase one started we still need some basic info. What kind of houses will be built for families? How will the water be dispensed? Also for agriculture we need to know some numbers about the need of irrigation and energy usage. We assigned tasks so Sasha would find out about the houses, Axel about the irrigation, Vesa about the energy use and I will start tackling the possibilities of small scale biogas solutions (plan is to use  biogas for at least cooking.)  

-Ville

Some of Sasha's beautiful notes on the meeting