Page History

Rachael Moxley

...

Fall 2008 Contributions

This semester, as a leader on the Outreach Team, I had to decide if we would focus on pursuing microfinance or grants as a means of fundraising. The way I interpret the path forward for AguaClara it would take far more time and resources to set up microfinance as a means to accomplish our ends, where as pursuing grants will help us sustain the employees at APP who are dedicated to building our plants. While in the future our plants will be bought out-right, and perhaps microfinance will prove beneficial after all, grants would help our immediate goals. Additionally the informational packet developed by the Spring 2008 team was very complete, I felt it was lacking in terms of expected topics covered and went too in-depth in some areas for what was needed. Thus, our focus this semester has largely been about finding and applying for grants.

For the first part of the semester I worked to create a flier to recruit someone to work with LabVIEW, submitted blurbs for the same recruitment to the Sundial and SWEmail, created a technical brochure, submitted an abstract for the ESW conference (which was postponed until fall), wrote a grant proposal, helped organize presentations for freshmen engineering 1050 classes, helped a middle school student find the best water treatment process for his future city, wrote up wiki minutes after weekly meetings, and worked with my team to create the submission for the google 10 to the 100 competition. I have also worked to lead team meetings and improve wiki organization for the outreach pages. In the second half of the semester, I have reorganized the attachments on the wiki pages, put up fliers for recruitment (including LabVIEW), helped set up an info session during pre-enroll, ordered t-shirts for the team, created a newsletter for alumni, supporters, and contacts, and edited the draft of the demo plant instruction manualand participated in the final presentations.

Spring 2008 Contributions

To start off the semester I have laid out the structure for the Automated Design Program. I did this by indicating important programs, subprograms, inputs and outputs, and the means by which each program is connected as sort of a starting point for creating code. Since then many of these have changed, and I suspect more will be revised as we create more of the code and figure out what is most efficient.

As a design team leader in charge of integration I wrote a gantt chart for the automated design team and detailed tasks for the semester so team members knew what was expected of them.

Once the program skeletons were turned in, Early on it became apparent that a better way to manage our files was needed. I set up a data repository on SourceForge using SubVersion. To communicate with the repository another program is needed. I chose TortoiseSVN and had it installed on most of the lab computers.

I have written much of the pipe database, whose initial scripts for calculating inner diameter of a pipe and data for pipe schedules was started by Tania. I expanded the program to handle SDR values, included descriptions of what the pipe specifications stood for to help understand the scripts to calculate the inner diameters and created programs to construct arrays for available pipe sizes.

I have written the Master Program which references and calls all the functions, and worked to integrate or debug the sub team files so that everything worked. This is especially important because most of the functions are dependent on the outputs of others and continually checking and revising the communication between them allows everyone to work on and check their own functions.

I also worked with Becky to construct the plant elevation program and the algorithm to determine lengths of effluent pipes from the sedimentation tank to the plant leveling tank. I created a chemical feed function that calculates the alum flow rate, but it is really just a skeleton and more work needs to be done to create this function.

In the midst of the semester I went to the Ithaca Youth Bureau to teach kids about water treatment.
In

By the second half end of the semester I worked to delegate more of the tasks that I had been doing so that everyone would become more comfortable with using the master program to check their own code. By this time most of the function needed only minor improvements, so I started to integrate the outputs from the design process to the inputs for the AutoCAD plant drawers.

I have met with Professor Weber-Shirk to determine where errors may be happening in design functions, to discuss what improvements still need to be made to the program including overall structure, and to integrate units with the LabView interface that allows users to create plants online.

At the end of the semester, while I do not know how every algorithm is created, I have a comprehensive understanding of the inner workings of the programs especially in terms of variables and structurehad worked to integrate the design variables between hydraulic design, unit processes, and autocad with labview.

{content-by-user:rjm72}{content-by-user}