About

We’re Alexander De Baere and Lauren Enghien, two KU Leuven engineering students focusing on intelligent mechanics. This blog will keep you updated on our master thesis for a humanitarian organization called Humasol.
Humasol is a non-profit organization, aiming to make renewable energy technologies accessible for everyone.

Therefore, Humasol:

1. Offers developing collaboration, both financially and technically, while focusing on ecological and sustainable projects;

2. Collaborates closely with the local partner in the South to enable him/her to maintain, repair, reproduce and redesign the installations;
3. Offers a professional guidance to projects student during the development programs.

Humasol is connecting three different stakeholders which are currently remote from each other: (engineering) students, local communities in the South and the Belgian professional world (government, companies). These three stakeholders could enforce each other and by bringing their strengths together, sustainable development for the South can be achieved (Humasol, 2014).

Now, about our thesis. What exactly is a hydraulic ram pump?
The hydraulic ram pump makes use of a phenomenon called the water hammer effect together with the potential energy of a large volume of water at low head to pump a small amount of that volume to a high head. People have been using this kind of pump for over two centuries, proving its advantages. The pump consists of only two moving parts, which make it very rigid and also cost-effective. The process is purely mechanical and doesn’t need an electrical intervenience, extending the product’s life and minimizing the maintenance costs (Young, 1996).

For the technical readers, here you can find a simulation of the working principle of a ram pump.

However it is a rather simple technology, only some computational models of the particular components exist. Our main objective will be to model the pump to obtain the best possible outcome for a particular situation. Once the model is made, we’ll verify the outcome by building a prototype. If the model works it can be used to model bigger ram pumps as well. If this part is successful we’ll have the opportunity to travel to the south, to implement a ram pump in an emerging country.

If you would like to follow the progress of our project, hit the follow button and we will keep you posted.

Cheers,
Alexander & Lauren