Page History

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Evaluate whether there are benefits to registering as a club (we concluded a club wasn't beneficial previously.)
Work with Engineering College Corporate relations to identify target corporations and donors. Meet with Abby Westervelt of the College of Engineering Corporate relations to discuss strategy.
Goal is to raise funds to support the R&D effort. Explore connections with Autodesk, CH2M Hill, CDM. Also pursue Gates Foundation and Warren Buffet Foundation.
Create an active web presence using blogs and twitters. Create blogs at least every 2 weeks. Sources for blogs are the team trip to Honduras, news from APP, AguaClara LLC, India, and, of course, the Cornell R&D teams.
Lauren Chambliss of the Atkinson Center may be willing to provide some guidance on fundraising as well.
Work with Joe Rowe of CEE to provide photos and videos for the TV screens in the CEE lobbies.
Write a story for National Instruments about the sedimentation tank hydraulics team and how we used the donated NI camera system to learn why floc blankets didn't form in the AguaClara plants that had flat sections in the bottom of the sedimentation tanks. Explain how we used the camera system to test various geometries.
Arrange for Monroe to give a TED talk. (http://www.ted.com/nominate/speaker)
Create a powerpoint slide that addresses the question of what AguaClara technologies do with pathogens. It is very common to think that the AguaClara focus on turbidity removal is misplaced and that we are ignoring pathogens. To address this misunderstanding we need a slide that shows microphotographs of clay particles and various pathogens (Cryptosporidium, Giardia, pathogenic E. coli, Vibrio cholera, etc.) to make it clear that these pathogens are larger than or similar in size to clay and that the same mechanism for removing clay will work to remove these pathogens.

Research

Ram Pump

Consolidate and annotate all the information that's already out there on homemade ram pumps – seems like there's a lot of it. Maybe it would ultimately be helpful to draw on those design guidelines to fill gaps in what the research is able to provide. Put all the info we can find in a concise organized format. Create a comprehensive ram pump design Mathcad sheet that covers all the cases we're likely to run into.

• Increase the pumped head to 4 m by installing a pressure relief valve (see image to the right) (Mcmaster 4703K54).  The pressure release valve can be adjusted to produce whatever back pressure is desired.
• Vary the wasting valve cycle time and measure the pumping efficiency. Use the theoretical acceleration time of the drive pipe water to guide the cycle time. Develop a method to adjust the valve cycle time.
• Consider adding a flow rate measurement device. Use a vertical pipe that is 70 cm long and that is filled with the pumped water. Measure the height of water in the pipe using a pressure sensor. Dump the water when the measuring device is full using a solenoid valve controlled with process controller.
• Consider swapping the PVC drive pipe for a galvanized iron pipe to see if the flexibility in the PVC pipe has a significant effect on pumping efficiency.
• Evaluate the possibility of building an inline ram pump where the waste continue directly to the distribution tank. The waste valve is no longer open to the atmosphere. First step is to explore this to see if anyone has tried this before. Check patents.
• Evaluate ram pumps that are on the market to see if any of them would be appropriate for our use. Our goal is to have a simple design that can easily be repaired locally.

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• Optimal upflow velocity in the sedimentation tank (currently set at 1 mm/s)
• Optimal ratio between floc blanket area and floc hopper area. Increasing the area dedicated to the floc hopper will decrease the wasteage of water and will increase the capital cost.
• Influence of depth of floc hopper on consolidation of the sludge. Perhaps the depth of the flocculator is primarily beneficial because it increases the interval between draining the floc hopper.
• What are the tradeoffs between continual wasteage and intermittent wasteage? Continual wasteage that keeps the floc hopper full would likely result in a lower average flow rate of waste. However, it might be more difficult to operate unless the operator can observe the floc hopper depth and regulate the flow easily.

Given a volume below the floc weir and an influent turbidity, develop a relationship that roughly gives the time until full floc blanket formation. This would be a useful guide in the field.

Experimental steps.

1. Lengthen the flocculator
2. Switch to using PACl
3. Conduct a series of experiments at 100 NTU varying PACl dose and measuring the resulting effluent turbidity from the tube settlers and the floc blanket concentration. Compare your results with the data from Matt Hurst using alum. Ideally compare this on a mole of aluminum basis
4. Implement external functions in Process Controller to measure height of sediment in floc hopper (see floc sed optimization for information on proposed external functions).
5. Use measured height of sediment to control the peristaltic pump that removes sludge from floc hopper. PID or simple on/off control could be used to control the sludge pump. This will make it possible to measure the flow rate and indirectly the concentration of the resulting sludge and hence to conduct experiments on the effect of floc hopper plan view area and depth.

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