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Future design improvements

•    Tubes: ½ " vertical  to 1" vertical  to 1" diameterdiagonal
•    Pumping the lime up to the top of the vertical column
•    Determining how the apparatus could be incorporated into a real Agua Clara plant

Things that we The team would like to work on in the future would be experiment with changing the lower half of the apparatus in the future.  Throughout our the experiments, we have it was determined that the lower vertical column is needed to keep the larger lime particles in suspension.  Our 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.  We would like 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 switch from a 1" column to a 2" column in the vertical section.  (See Figure 8)
Figure 8

Another design change we are considering under consideration is the possibility of pumping the lime slurry up to the vertical column.  This would make it more "user-friendly" as two of our the team members are not tall enough to feed the lime and thus, cannot run an experiment independently.  Concerns associated with this method would be configuring Process Controller to run multiple pumps, differing flow rates for water verses lime slurry, when to pump which, and more.  The pumping method also raises the issue that lime has to travel through so much tubing to reach the apparatus, providing it with a lot of surface area to settle on or coat.  This will make it difficult to know exactly how much lime is actually making it into the apparatus.
One final design challenge that we need to tackle must be tackled in the coming weeks is thinking about how our the design could be implemented into an Agua Clara 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).