Subhani Katugampala's Individual Contribution Page

Spring 2014 Contributions

I am currently working on the Water Treatment Technology Selection Guide and Plant Cost Calculator research group. I am reviewing the guide made by previous AguaClara members and revising it to integrate with the web design. My role on the team is to research various water treatment options and to develop an accurate means to compare them. 

Spring 2014 Mid-Semester Contributions

At this mid-semester stage, I have accomplished many of the goals outlined at the beginning of the year. The development of the Water Treatment Technology Selection Guide is currently underway. Up to this point, I have managed to create a flow diagram outlining the decisions the guide will make based on user inputs. This diagram was created solely on the basis of surface water treatment and shows the logic of the program. After the completion of the surface water case of the guide, it will be expanded to include all other cases (i.e. - groundwater). In addition, the team has also decided to use HTML/PHP/mySQL as the technology platform to create the guide. We decided to use this rather than LabVIEW as it effectively creates dynamic webpages as well as provides a user-friendly interface. Now that we have made several of our important decisions, we will move on to the programming side of guide and begin to develop the back-end interface that runs according to the flow diagram. By the end of this semester, we should have coded the flow diagram and integrate it with the Plant Cost Calculator.

Spring 2014 End of Semester Contributions

In the end, we were able to create a functioning web-based guide. We were able to incorporate PHP code into the HTML form in order to generate a results page. One of the problems we ran into was that the AguaClara web-server was not PHP enabled. We were able to combat this by operating an offline test server called MAMP. This provided us with a means to test out the mechanisms of the guide. The Water Treatment Technology Selection Guide we have developed only involves the surface water case to date. Some alterations the guide moving forward would be to expand the guide to include the ground water case, further research the decentralized water treatment options, and the integrate it with the Plant Cost Calculator and the AguaClara design engine.