Francine's Individual Contribution Page

Summer 2009 Contributions

I am the team leader for the Chemical Dosing Control subteam. This summer my team and I designed and ran experiments in an attempt to recreate a surface foam that is currently found in AguaClara plants. As a team we wrote code in Process Controller to automate the experiments, troubleshooted the apparatus, and monitored the experiments. We now believe that the surface foam is caused by natural surfactants in the water. The surfactants stabilize air bubbles caused by aeration in the plants. These bubbles then form the surface foam in the plants.

Currently, our team is working to team to find a simple solution to the aeration problem in the plants. We believe that reducing the aeration of water will lead to less foam formation. Once we are able to find a solution, we hope to retrofit current plants in order to reduce the surface foams.

My contribution to the mid-term Wiki was the results and discussion section. For this assignment, I focused mainly on the cause of bubble formation and interpretation of our results thus far.

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