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The next task I worked on related to what holds up the launders on the inlet channel side of the tank. We emailed with the engineers in Honduras and talked to Monroe about some ideas. For the time being, that project has been put on the back burner. However, I shortened the length of the launder so that it does not span the entire width of the sed tank. This way it can be slid out of the coupling and removed if necessary. I also added a cap to the inlet channel side. I also made a minor change to the sed tank by adding space between the top of the lamella and the launder, which adjusted the height of the tank and the height of the water in the tank as well. This is so we can add something in to hold up the launder and also to allow for some error in construction. These changes have been documented on the Launder Design Program page.

Since the midterm, the majority of my work has been debugging code written earlier in the semester or from last semester. There were problems with the launder and the length had to be adjusted again. Also, we inserted a PVC cap at the inlet channel end of the launder so that water would not flow out that way since the pipe no longer spans the entire length of the sed tank. We had similar problems orienting and arraying this correctly as with the coupling. Another issue that arose was with the change of the Basic Inputs, the pipe schedule changed and created problems for the cap and coupling functions, so some of the functions used to determine the diameters of these items had to be changed so they would work for any schedule.

Another thing I updated was the launder control pieces. Since we corrected the coupling earlier in the semester to have sockets on both ends, the control piece that stops water flow into the launder from the exit channel had to be changed to reflect that. This is in the "Launder Cap" MathCAD file.

The biggest task we worked on for the past couple weeks was updating the coupling script. Previously, the script would just draw the coupling wherever the user placed it, usually into a section of wall. However, then the user would have to manually subtract out the wall that the coupling overlapped with. We redesigned the script in a new file called "couplingsubtract" so it will automatically remove the appropriate pieces of the wall. The coupling function now requires several more inputs, including the layer of the wall, the layer of the coupling, and a point on the wall to subtract to allow this.

Fall 2009 Contributions

This semester, I am continuing as a member of the Design Team. The project I have been working on this semester is designing control pieces to shut off flow from the inlet chimneys into the sedimentation tank. I added information about this to the Inlet Channel Design Program.

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