Maysoon Sharif's Individual Contribution Page

Fall 2009 Contributions

Jeff and I have been working on a code to calculate the size of ports that need to be drawn into the bottom of the lower baffles. We built off of a drain time function that was already in the MathCAD files that calculated the drain time for a particular port size. We graphed several of the inputs to the function against each other to try to find obvious relationships between them. As a result, we discovered that when the port size and the valve size (the valve that drains the flocculator from outside the tank) are the same, the relationship between the number of "tanks" (spaces between lower baffles) and the drain time is linear. Realizing that as long as the port area is no bigger than the cross-sectional area of the valve, the size of the ports limits the time it takes to drain the flocculator. To simplify the calculation, we decided to set the area of the port equal to the area of the valve.

Given a drain time, a function was written to calculate the valve diameter using the existing drain time function. The new function iterates from the smallest possible diameter to the diameter that provides a drain time no greater than 110% of the given time. The smallest possible diameter is desirable, because it ensures minimal cost of design.

In writing the autoCAD code, much of the existing code was made more efficient to save ourselves time in returning drawings. Union functions were added to subtract groups of objects simultaneously. Also, we removed iterations that intended to calculate existing variables. Additionally, the baffles are no longer being drawn using the lamina program, but rather, the simple box function.

Our port code (floctankbaffleportscript) was made to draw ports on alternating sides of the lower baffles so that water does not drain linearly through the tank (thus not getting mixed properly.) In order to subtract these quickly, the baffles were unioned in addition to the ports themselves.

We restructured the AutoCAD scripts wiki page to be more descriptive. All of the AutoCAD scripts for the flocculator should now be up to date, including pictures.

Jeff, Julie, and I worked on the code for the horizontal flocculator. Generic variables for lengths and widths were used to calculate dimensions, allowing us to reuse the same code for both the horizontal and vertical cases. Also, most of the existing position calculations were converted into matrices of the same size so that the code would be loaded to handle both vertical and horizontal calculations. The position calculations for the baffles change (using an if statement) depending on whether the number of channels is even or odd. A code strictly for the horizontal case currently draws an accurate floc tank, but more work must be done to incorporate the decision variable between the horizontal and vertical flocculators so that a single file can be used to calculate positions and dimensions for either case.

Summer 2009 Contributions

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Floctankbafflescript

Flocchannelslotscript

Floctankbaffleportscript

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