Roy Guarecuco's Individual Contribution Page

Fall 2010 Contributions

During the Fall 2010 semester I continued to work with the ANC Control team. Specifically, I worked on the new effluent recycle system designed for the current ANC Control lime feeder model. The effluent recycle system was designed to carry a fraction of the lime feeder effluent back to a precipitation reactor seeded with calcium carbonate to remove carbonates from the lime feeder influent before it reached the main reactor. This design was expected to keep the main reactor effluent basic enough to add sufficient alkalinity for further chemical dosing with alum. The goal was for the lime feeder effluent to maintain a pH of ~12 for at least 24 hours, so that a plant operator would only have to add the lime solution to the main reactor once a day. This pH would theoretically drop to the optimal 6.5 to 7.5 pH range required for flocculation after being dosed with alum. However, after learning that research in Honduras discovered that the use of a new coagulant, poly-aluminum chloride instead of alum, kept the pH of the chemical dose controller effluent between the optimal 6.5 to 7.5 pH range required for flocculation, the lime feeder research was stopped.
After the lime feeder research was stopped, I joined the Chemical Dose Controller team along with the rest of the ANC team and worked on redesigning and constructing the nonlinear CDC prototype with the focus of minimizing the cost and number of parts so as to make the CDC more operator-friendly.