Spring 2011

Spring 2011

This wiki page is mainly for internal PSS communication. For more information about the Structure team, go to the Structure Team page.

Introduction to the Team

The Structures team is new to the AguaClara project. Professor Weber-Shirk created the team this semester to provide structural analysis for the growing number of Aguaclara water treatment plants. Currently, the automated design tool does not provide structural designs for the tanks. Our ultimate goal is to automate the design of the tanks including column spacing, column sizing, and rebar use when given the required tank height, width, and length.

The team focused on organizing data and resources in the form of e-mail correspondences and meetings with Cornell University professors to decide on the first problem to address. Following the meetings, the team decided to analyze the structural capabilities for the columns and walls using the specifications from the Alauca plant. We have been working in conjunction with Dan Smith and Santiago Garcia to obtain relevant information about the AguaClara plants.

Structure Team Updates

Our team has been working on analyzing the structural capabilities of the columns and walls of the flocculator and sedimentation tanks. The following link guides the reader through a comprehensive analysis of the design shear and moment loads as well as the current moment capacity of the columns in the flocculator tank to be built in Alauca. Ultimately, the team would like to automate the design of key structural elements given the desired tank dimensions as well as the depth of water in the tanks. We will continually update our progress through the Structure team Wiki page.

Structures Team Updates

Structure Team Challenges

Because the Structures team is a newly formed team, we had a hard time hitting the ground running. A good portion of our time was spent on collecting resources, talking to professors, and figuring out exactly which tasks could viably be completed given our engineering background and time constraints. However, after we narrowed down our goals, we have steadily made progress in our analysis of key structural elements in the Alauca plant and will soon be able to automate an efficient design of tank columns and walls.

The team has definitely been challenged intellectually, given our limited structural engineering experience, as well as organizationally, as this is everyone's first time working with each other. However, we have utilized our resources to acquire the necessary knowledge required to accomplish our tasks. Also, we have learned each other's strengths and weaknesses and are now able to work efficiently to ensure all of our assignments are completed on time and to the best of our abilities. The Structures team hopes to continue growing as a team and make solid contributions to AguaClara by this semester's end.

Updated Detailed Task List

• Determine moment in column at incipient cracking in the tension face and set this moment as our maximum allowable moment
• Transpose our column design calculations to a MathCAD file from Excel
• Convert calculations and tables to the metric system
• Write a MathCAD file that will produce column sizing and spacing given key inputs such as the dimensions of the tank and height of the water; this will include rebar size and amount of rebar used