Alex Vandenbergh's Individual Contribution Page

Summer 2009 Contributions

I'm a new member this summer, 2009, working with the Chemical Dosing Control subteam. For summer 2009, I started out working with the rest of the CDC team setting up and then running experiments in an attempt to recreate a foam forming in current AguaClara plants. My role in the experiments was the same as for the other members: I used Process Controller to create the code on the computer that would run the experiment, I helped run the experiment by monitoring it's progress, and I went through the code we had written in order to find the bugs that initially plagued the experiment. We eventually determined that a surfactant was strengthening bubbles caused by aeration in the plants, and eventually the bubbles formed a foam on the surface of the water.

For the CDC Teach-In, I was responsible for finding and creating visuals for our slide show. I took pictures of our experimental setup and added labels to them. Then I used Adobe Illustrator to create a diagram representing our experimental setup. In addition, I volunteered to assemble the various slides from each member into a single, coherent slide show.

Currently, as of July 1, I am working with the rest of my team to find a solution to the aeration problem in the plants. We believe that reducing or eliminating the aeration of water will lead to less foam formation. I'm specifically in charge of designing diagrams to help visualize our current theoretical solutions.

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