Alex Vandenbergh's Individual Contribution Page

Summer 2009 Contributions

I'm a new member this summer, 2009, working with the Chemical Dosing Control subteam. For summer 2009, I started out working with the rest of the CDC team setting up and then running experiments in an attempt to recreate a foam forming in current AguaClara plants. My role in the experiments was the same as for the other members: I used Process Controller to create the code on the computer that would run the experiment, I helped run the experiment by monitoring it's progress, and I went through the code we had written in order to find the bugs that initially plagued the experiment. We eventually determined that a surfactant was strengthening bubbles caused by aeration in the plants, and eventually the bubbles formed a foam on the surface of the water.

For the CDC Teach-In, I was responsible for finding and creating visuals for our slide show. I took pictures of our experimental setup and added labels to them. Then I used Adobe Illustrator to create a diagram representing our experimental setup. In addition, I volunteered to assemble the various slides from each member into a single, coherent slide show.

I worked with the rest of my team to find a solution to the aeration problem in the plants. We believed that reducing or eliminating the aeration of water would lead to less foam formation. I was specifically in charge of designing diagrams to help visualize our current theoretical solutions, and putting them up on the wiki.

Once we had our 4 main designs, my team and I set about testing each one to see which were actually possible solutions. I played a major role in determining the distance that jets of water coming into the LFOM through orifices would travel. As a team, we all worked hard to test the designs, going so far as to travel to the pilot plant to physically test two of our designs. I was in charge of taking photos of our test and uploading them to the wiki at the Experimental Method for Retrofit Designs page.

After finalizing our retrofit designs, I began work with Francine on the Non-Linear Doser. I focused mainly on creating a visual to help others envision how the NLD would be set up.

Pages Created

While I did not create the entire CDC Summer 2009 Goals page, this page (as well as the Research Plan page contained within) was not created by any single member of the team, and was worked on by all of us.

I have attached the June 25, 2009 CDC Teach-In, which I was in charge of collecting and organizing, to this page.