Christina Campagna

Midterm Report

A lot of what our team did for the first part of the semester involved extensive planning of our goals and future plans and familiarizing ourselves with all aspects of the Demo plant (because 3 out of 4 of our members are new). I learned how to run the plant, the purpose of each individual part of the plant, and how it all relates to the efficiency at which the plant reduces the turbidity of the water. More recently though, we have been working more on the design aspects of the plant and I've become a lot more familiar with the Engineering behind it all, such as how head loss, flow rate, and other aspects of the flow control relate to each other.

I performed the flocculation efficiency experiment with Taylor at the start of the design process, in which we observed the point at which the flocs reached their maximum size. Then, by relating it to our current MathCAD program, we found a more accurate efficiency value, as well as a better horizontal flocculator length for the design of the new plant. I've also contributed to the design of the new sedimentation tank that will distribute equal amounts of water through each lamella column.

Final Report

In the last portion of the semester, our team really accomplished a lot more of our concrete goals. Once we became familiar with the Demo Plant and it's previous construction we were able to design and build 2 new Sedimentation Tanks, 2 new identical flocculators, and 2 new identical flow control modules.

With the new Demo Plant I, as well as the other Demo Plant Spring 2008 members, ran experiments at various flow rates, logging how turbidity changes with time at each flow.

I helped to analyze the data shown in the Results and Discussion section of the Demo Plant Performance Tests, and to compare the G-theta values calculated with and without the frictional losses in the vertical columns of the lamella. From this data analysis and calculations we together concluded that the frictional losses, accounting for a 5 times greater shear in the Demo Plant, cannot be neglected as previously assumed. We also concluded that a 50 mL/min flow rate appears to yield the lowest turbidity values and largest flocs. We believed this to be due to the high shear at larger flows leading to floc breakup.

Throughout the semester I have also helped to create and edit the following pages:

• Demo Plant
• Demo Plant Fall 2007 Report
• Demo Plant Design & Construction
• Flocculator
• Demo Plant Research
• Demo Plant Flocculation Efficiency
• Demo Plant Performance Tests
• Demo Plant Future Goals
• Demo Plant Pictures and Figures