Francine's Individual Contribution Page

Summer 2009 Contributions

I am the team leader for the Chemical Dosing Control subteam. This summer my team and I designed and ran experiments in an attempt to recreate a surface foam that is currently found in AguaClara plants. As a team we wrote code in Process Controller to automate the experiments, troubleshooted the apparatus, and monitored the experiments. We now believe that the surface foam is caused by natural surfactants in the water. The surfactants stabilize air bubbles caused by aeration in the plants. These bubbles then form the surface foam in the plants.

Our team team then sought to find a simple solution to the aeration problem in the plants. We believe that reducing the aeration of water will lead to less foam formation. We came up with and tested three different designs to retrofit current plants in order to reduce the surface foams. The most promising of which is the inclined LFOM design.

Lastly, our team redesigned and wrote mathCAD code for the non-linear chemical doser.

My major contributions to the team included the results and discussion section of the wiki and the mathCAD coding for the non-linear chemical doser.

Pages Created