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"Semester" Contributions
This spring we will be working on the pore size of the foam filter, trying to get more understanding on what determines the efficiency of the system. We first want to see what the influence of adding a flocculator before our foam filter on the final efficiency. Our foam filter will be 2015 is my first and only semester at Cornell and also AguaClara. As part of the (first ever) Foam Filter Pore Size team, I have been designing and building a small scale decoupled foam filter, with one inch diameter. This will allow any experiment later on to be executed much faster. We also designed and built a flocculator to hook up with the filter. It appeared to be working very efficiently. A particularity of our foam filter is that it is decoupled (one filter for the coarse pores and one for the fine pores) in order to get values of turbidity after each filter. Right now i am working on designing this system. We will then define an influent having specific clay, humic acid and coagulant concentrations matching as closely as possible the influent in Honduras. This "cocktail" will be run through our newly designed system and purifiedWe have not come that far but hope future groups will use the filter a lot and get understanding on the separate effect of each foam pore size. For now, it seems that the coarse foam acts as a continuum of the flocculator. Further research has to be done on that.
My major contribution this semester has been in the designing of the filter, the ordering of the supplies and the final assembling. As I was new, the ordering was sometimes difficult: not knowing the name of the supplies made the orders challenging... Therefore, it was decided to make a catalog of the supplies ordered during this semester for next Foam generations to use. This catalog will be on the wiki very soon.