Future design improvements
• Tubes: ½ " vertical to 1" vertical to 1" diagonal - OR - 1" vertical to 2" vertical to 2" diagonal
• Pumping the lime up to the top of the vertical column
• Determining how the apparatus could be incorporated into a real Agua Clara plant
The team would like to experiment with changing the lower half of the apparatus in the future. Throughout the experiments, it was determined that the lower vertical column is needed to keep the larger lime particles in suspension. The experiments have shown that the smaller, finer lime particles travel up into the 2" diagonal column and are either suspended there, settle onto the lower diagonal, or travel up the upper diagonal and escape in the effluent. A new goal is to keep more of the lime mass suspended in the lower vertical column. One idea for achieving this would be to have a section of 1" column followed by a 2" column in the vertical section. The concept behind this is that a tapered base would be ideal but difficult to construct. Thus, changing from a smaller diameter to a larger diameter mimics a tapered column but it easy to construct. Figure 8 shows a possible design in which the vertical column switches from a 1" column to a 2" column.
Figure 8
Easy to construct "tapered" vertical column.
Another design change under consideration is the possibility of pumping the lime slurry up to the vertical column. This can be achieved by modeling after the set-up described in Experiment 7, and could be applied to the original 100 gram lime slurry with which each experiment begins. Using this set-up can improve user-friendliness with the shorter members of the team.
One final design challenge that must be tackled in the future is thinking about how the design could be implemented into an Aguaclara plant. Due to the height of the apparatus, it may be necessary to have the bottom rest below the floor where the operator would be walking. If the apparatus started at the lower level of the sedimentation tank (or floc tank) and then rose above ground to expose the vertical and diagonal columns, it might be at an appropriate height for the operator to feed the lime manually (without a ladder).