ANC CONTROL

Spring 2010 Research

INTRODUCTION

The Spring 2010 ANC team continued the design from Fall 2009 team, based on the same idea that by settling a slanting tube on a vertical column, the apparatus would function as an inverted traffic cone which has a high velocity at the bottom to fluidize big particles and a lower velocity at the top to capture small particles.(see 2009 design). However, in order to overcome the difficulties faced in the previous design, the new team improved the design by changing slanting tube's diameter from 1 inch to 2 inches, and setting up another vertical tube with a wye connection. (see new lime feeder design) 

In the following experimental set-up with both new apparatus(A2) and old one(A1), the team tried to design a series of experiments in order to determine all the possible parameters which may influence the lime feeder's performance, all those parameters were based on Spring 2010 team's hypothesis (see hypothesis). In addition, from previous ANC team's proposal, it's very important to set comparison experiment to test each parameter separately, so the new team did all the experiments with a single comparable parameter as the principle in experimental set-up.

Based on the team's experimental set-up, (number) comparison experiments had been carried on, the results and analysis is shown in each experiment. 
Experiment 1: Minimum amount of lime input in two apparatus

Experiment 2: Tap water versus distilled water in A2 system

Experiment 3: Contious lime input to A2 systems' full capacity

From the experimental observation and results analysis, the Spring 2010 team proposed several suggestions on how to possibly improve the design in the future, and studied the feasibility of implementing the design in Aguaclara plant. (see future challenges)