Define:

Ms. Yorke decided to become an entrepreneur and get into the business of water filtration. Her enterprise: Yorke water filtration ltd. has hired our group; Natalie, Joelle and I to take polluted water and filter it so it can then be released to the Pitt River. She has entrusted us with her newest client: Edible Agriculture, a farm in PoCo. our job is to create and test a prototype for the filter.

Discover:

Some questions are:

• What does the waste water consist of?
  • What chemicals are in the liquid?
  • Which aspects are potentially toxic, dangerous or need to be filtered out?
  • How can we find out?
• How to purify the different water factors
  • Temperature
  • pH
  • Dissolved Oxygen
  • Turbidity
  • Nitrates
  • Phosphates
  • Total dissolved solids
  • Alkalinity

What do large scale producers use?

Answers:

• People in developing countries use cloths to filter debris such as leaves or branches
• Slow sand filters use sand to filter out biological organisms
• Activated charcoal is used to remove impurities
• We tested different chemicals that were at our disposal. They were SrCl2, RCl, CuCl2 and NaCl. To our dismay none of them were a match to a sample on a wooden stick that we tested.
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• Dream:

• In elementary school we used rocks to filter water and after the process the turbidity was clear. I believe that we should therefore use rocks.
• Either end of the 2L jug can be used as the bottom of the filter.
  • The side that you drink from can be used as a funnel at the end of the filter. This is easier as there is already a hole in which the water can drain from.
  • The side that is normally at the bottom can also be used. We can put small holes in each part of the bottom which can be useful to avoid backlogs of water.

• I believe that if we put sand or gravel at anything but the bottom they would mix which in turn could cause the filter to improperly function. This is why I suggested to use the filter paper to separate the different layers. This will also make a devide that is clearer when taking photos.
• Our group went through many phases of design.

Deliver: 

Before filtration:

The water had an abominable smell that i can not described. It also had a colouring that was a yellow. The water not clear and there were pine needle that were in the water. The filter seemed to be strong and I was cautiously optimistic that it would work.

After filtration:

Some qualitative data there appeared to be no undissolved objects that were in the water, the yellow stain that had once plagued the water was no longer, the water appeared to have no scent and the filter seemed to have to fallen apart.

Some qualitative data is that  we poured a full beaker which is is around 500ml, it took around 1:00 for the water to make it’s way through the filter, the Ph level remained at 4.5 and the water was still at room temperature.

IMG_7965

Debrief

We had multiple layer of different materials but we decided to use sand and gravel at the top to filter organisms. Then we used the charcoal to finish and finally we used cotton balls to make the water clear. I was nervous that our filter was not going to work, but it looks clear and does not have any large particles. Unfortunately we were not able to change the Ph and it remained at a 4.5. I believe that we had success overall with our filter. I do not believe that we could compare it to that of the might Pitt River but our filter did a good job of making the water pure.

I believe that the process of solution fluency was a help to us as we took the project step-by-step. We used each of the 5D’s to make the project and our project was a success so I will continue to use this method of work.