Jeff Will's Individual Contribution Page
"Semester" Contributions
Paragraph (really, just one please 
) explaining contributions to date. Provide links to pages you worked on. Ex. "I re-wrote the main chemical doser page so that it is up-to-date to reflect the new research we are conducting."
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Fall 2009 Contributions
May and I have been working on developing MathCad code to determine the port drain size needed through the bottom baffles in a vertical flocculator so that it may drain in a desired amount of time. We used an already-existing MatchCAD file that solved for the time numerically given a port size. In an attempt to find an anlytical solution, we graphed several parameters versus time to see if there was a clear relationship. This gave the result that the dain time is roughly linear with respect to the number of successive ports, and negligibly nonlinear in the range of ports we would use in a real plant, as long as the ports were smaller than the valve. Based on this, we chose to set the port size equal to the valve size.
We wrote a new function in the MathCAD file to itterate through the allowable valve sizes and use the time function to determine the drain time. If the time function returned a drain time within 110% of the user's desired drain time, this valve are would be used. The extra 10% allowance is to find the most economical answer, balancing construction costs with cleaning time.
In addition to the AutoCAD coding for the vertical flocculator ports, we made the code more efficient for the other scripts in floctank drawing program so the program would execute faster and save us time in debugging our own code. This inculded the addition of union functionsto subtract groups of objects simultaneously, removing iterations that intended to calculate existing variables, and chaning how the baffles were drawn from using the lamina program to the simple box function.
The floctankbaffleportscript draws ports on alternating sides of the lower baffles so that water does not have a straight-line path through the tank and preventing proper flocculation. The efficiency of this function was imporved by unioning the baffles as well as the ports to necessitate a single subtract rather than one for each port.