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Currently have 1 reactor assembled. Will begin testing air-tightness and quantifying any air leaks. Afterwards, will inoculate reactor while building another 1-3 additional reactors.
Mid-Semester Progress:
Two reactors have been fabricated and biomass granules obtained. We plan on building an additional two reactors and hopefully inoculating them and operating the systems as continuous processes.
Final semester Progress:
A total of four UASB reactors have been fabricated this semester. It is the hope of the group that 2 reactors can be used as controls and 2 reactors can be used as experimental variants in the future. The new reactors are improvements on the old reactors due to the newly applied union in the reactor body that makes them easy to disassemble, the reduced number of inlet/outlet ports to minimize opportunities for gas leakage, and their size makes them easy to operate and safely mount on the lab bench. The reactors, however, require frequent maintenance. The outlet lines in the basement lab require that all fluid be pumped out and the team does was unable to access any additional pumps; as a solution, the team used effluent holding tanks that had to be emptied daily. The influent water was also placed in sizable tanks that needed to be refilled daily. In the future, making the system more continuous could greatly increase its user-friendliness.