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My senior design project was to design and build a water valve for rural Africa, to replace their existing water valves. This valve was created because current valves are overused and frequently break. When the valves break, they frequently go long periods without being replaced, since most people are living off less than a dollar a day. A bicycle inner tube is locally available and was therefore selected to be the failure point, so villagers could easily repair the valve using readily available materials.
Parts for the water valve design needed to be very inexpensive and locally available, making this project challenging. I was the group leader that drove the team through all the stages of the design process and we came up with a simple yet effective design that I was able to test in a village in Mali, Africa.
