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During the Spring 2009 semester I have been the team leader of the Dissolved Air Flotation of Flocs Team. This semester the Floating Floc team broke into two sub-sub teams: Floating Floc Aeration Method and the Floating Floc Sand Filter Fluidized Bed Method. I am working with the aeration group which is focused on the use of aeration of the water in the grit chamber to reduce the dissolved oxygen (DO) content of the water. Thus far I have worked hard to solve the problems we have encountered in the design and operation of the mini grit chamber/entrance pipe and at this point Tanya and I have come very close to solving all of the problems (hopefully). The experiments we have performed have not had the results that we had hoped for, but it is possible that problem actually lies in the testing DO probe being under different pressures rather than the concept in general.
While the set up was being constructed I did literature searches and wrote one of the summaries & annotated bibliographies. I have also worked hard to stay on top of my team and make sure all the assignments get finished, including individual assignments.
In the second half of the Spring semester the aeration team was disbanded and Tanya and I have joined the Sand Filter team. The aeration method was deemed a "successful failure" because we successfully determined that using aeration to decrease the DO in the water did not work fast enough. The entire experiment had many complications, some of which we were not able to resolve like the issue with the DO probe on how its readings were inconsistent, possibly due to the alternating positive and negative pressure. Tanya and I tried for a while to get this experiment to properly simulate the pipe leading into the grit chamber and the entrance into the tank but after a lot of work it was decided that we were headed down a dead end road. It is possible that the method would work in real life and to really work this experiment had to be done in full scale which is impractical. This experiment was abandoned in favor of putting more man power behind the sand filter method which shows promise.
As part of the Sand Filter team I have helped modify the experimental apparatus to include "Bob" which is our bubble chamber we used to aerate the water in the Aeration Group's experiments. I have also been involved in the experiments and the group think to fix all of our problems. I have let Haley take more of the lead now since she knows more about the current experiment since it was her sub team. We hope to have real data soon.
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