Floating Flocs Meeting Minutes

Spring 2009 Minutes

Wrote meeting minutes
Recalibrated the water level, temperature sensor, and flow rate for experiments with vary sizes of sand.
Reconfigure the Sand Filter Setup to accommodate higher flow rates.
Add the Aerator Apparatus from aeration method to supersaturate the cold water flowing into the sand filter setup.

Process Controller: Instructions for setup was typed up in a Word Doc for anyone to use our setup and run experiments.
Reprogram Process Controller: add a pressure sensor to monitor the water level in the Aerator Apparatus.
Flow rate measure in Process Controller is not accurate because we altered the flow sensor to acquire a higher range of flow range that can be utilized.
4/17: Talked to Monroe about issues of pressure buildup

Data collected for two different expansion distances in sand suspension for Sand A (size unknown) and Sand 40 (0.42 - 0.59mm)
Data collected for Sand 40 (0.42 - 0.59mm) is unreliable because during the run, the temperature probe read the temperature over 100C, which is impossible. As a result, cold water was constantly following into the setup instead of a mixture of hot and cold water.
Ran an experiment with Sand 30 (0.84 - 0.59 mm) which results in a problem for our setup to suspend such large sand size. This error indicates that our setup has a limit to what sand size can be suspended in our setup without causing a buildup in pressure and water overflowing.

With larger grain sizes, the setup builds up pressure and causes overflow of water level into the pressure sensor tubing.
Need to add another features to the setup to run experiment with larger sand sizes such as Sand 30 (0.84 - 0.59 mm) and Sand 20 (1.18 - 0.84mm).
Need to expand the current hole size on the bottom of the bubble collection container to relieves some potential pressure buildup in the setup.
Need to collect data and retest grain sizes with the improved setup.