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I have been working with Andrew Hirshfield to continue modifying the inlet and exit weir tanks. I have made design changes to the heights and positioning of the tanks so there is no overlap with inlet channel or the weirs. I have added the pipe connecting from the waste elbow in the exit weir tank to the inlet tee and have rotated the tee to meet the waste system guidelines. All changes have been added to the sedtankw/pieces MathCAD file.
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I have created a Wiki page for the inlet and exit weir tanks and Andrew Hirshfield is helping add to it.
The inlet tee has been correctly rotated and the connecting pipe dimension has been corrected for the automated design. I also changed the elevation of the tee, elbows, and weir pipes so that the midpoint of the tee and elbow outlets are equal to the origin points of the sedimentation tank drain valves. The elevations were also changed with the fact that the drain channel origin will be at z = 0 in mind.
I added the inlet channel pipe plugs to the sedimentation tank code. They were lost when the chimney design was scrapped.
I spent a good part of the second semester debugging various plant designs by testing them with the Beta Server and the ADT. I found various errors in different parts of the plant and delegated the fixing of these tasks to other members of the design team and also fixed the errors in the codes that I was familiar with. Debugging the plant designs was the most beneficial task I have undertaken while working on the AguaClara project. It helped me learn about different parts of the plant and expanded my knowledge in different areas of design for the project. I have had a great time working on the project this semester and look forward to coming back in the fall and continuing my work.
Summer 2010 Contributions
I worked with Brian White to create tutorial files for future teams to learn AutoCAD and MathCAD. I annotated the file sedtank w pieces and wrote an algorithm description as well as list directions to complete each step. We also went through and added detailed documentation to the Sedimentation Tank MathCAD file.
I did more work with debugging on the ADT. I found overlapping errors for low flow rates and added a design constraint to the number of sed tanks to overcome this error. I have more work to do with debugging this issue.
Lastly, I changed the design of the weir tanks to be extensions of the channels instead of boxes at the end of channels. I encountered a problem with the inlet channel side and plan to fix it next semester if I am unable to finish it this summer.
Fall 2010 Contributions
I am working on creating an automated design of the drain channel for the online design tool. Nanditha and I have contact the engineers in Honduras for their input in the design. They helped us determine the positioning of the channel which is crucial to the coding. We have also met with Monroe to determine design assumptions and constraints that must be considered while designing the channel. I also wrote and iterative code that finds the optimal head loss from which the geometry will be determined.
We then coded the channel by creating two cross sections, one and the beginning of the flocculator and one and the end of the sedimentation tank, and lofting them together. May helped create a Loft function in the MtoAtranslators page which allowed us to do this. The channel is now drawn completely with the correct slope derived from the headloss. The channel was designed with a conservative approach in mind, so future changes could optimize the volume to its absolute minimum. Finally, I documentated the code files, transferred them over to the source file. Testing is the next step.
Pages Created
Automated Materials List Design Program
Automated Materials List Inputs
Automated Materials List Outputs
Inlet and Exit Weir Tank Design Program
Drain Channel Design Program